There’s someone living in the basement of LHS. Okay, he’s not really living in the basement, but he spends most of his day there. That man is Dan Sheridan, LPS’s athletic equipment repairman.  Not a lot of people know about him, and almost no one knows where his office is.  The doorway that leads to his office is hard to notice, because most of us think it’s a storage closet, but in reality it is a stairway that leads to the basement. Most students walk past the doorway every day and take no notice of it. Sheridan spends a big portion of his day down there.

“Pretty much my whole time (about about 8 hours a day) is spent here,” he said. I asked if he ever got lonely, and he replied, “If I want to see somebody or the sun, I will just go upstairs.”

When you rest walk down the stairs it seems as if you are walking into a dark empty dungeon. All you see is concrete walls and dusty furniture. But once you get down to the bottom level, you see a half cut door and his office in the left corner of the basement. His office is unlike any other office in the building; it’s a huge workshop. Once you look past the door and into his workshop, you see a bright lit room, with a lot of power tools, hear loud music, and see that everything is organized from the vinyl on the racks to the foams in their pit. His office consists of band saws, drills, multiple tables, vinyl, and everything you would need to repair anything for a school.

Since Sheridan is an athletic equipment repairman, most of the objects he repairs are gym related.

“I repair all kinds of stuff for Lincoln Public Schools, you see it all around wall pads, all kinds of auditorium cur- tains, gym curtains, weight room equipment in all the high schools, middle schools, multitude of things” Sheridan said. He is very innovative too. Once something rips or gets torn up, such as a bow and arrow target, he rips it open and lls it with denser material so that it can last longer. Sheridan also repairs athletic bags for our sports teams.

“I sew all the canvas products that the schools have on their catalog that LPS has. That includes travel bags, bas- ketball bags, volleyball bags, shotput, discus bags, I build all that stuff from canvas,” he explained.

Sheridan is a man with Santa’s big white beard, and he is usually wearing blue overalls. Since most of his day is spent in the basement, he doesn’t really get to come up out of office so locating him was a hard task. Everyone I asked told me it would be hard to contact him, because there is no telephone extension down there. It took two days of hard searching, almost like a man hunt, to try to get leads to where he stays. Finally, with a little bit of luck I hit the jackpot! I didn’t know what to expect. At first glance, you would think Sheridan is intimidating with his big beard and loud music playing in the background. But after getting to know him he was really kind. Sheridan lives with his small family. “I got a wife and a cat..no kids.”

Sheridan has had a lot of history at Lincoln High.

“It’s a great school you know, I’ve always been here it seems like. I’ve been down here in Lincoln High’s basement for 16 years.” Sheridan has been here for almost as long as the last athletic equipment repairman, Al Ullsperger, that worked at here for 18 years. Although Sheridan is the only athletic repairman for LPS, he isn’t the only person working around the schools to help x things up.

“Some of the stuff like the basketball hoops and stuff like that the other guys kind of do some of that stuff. We got some other guys that are pretty good at that, they help out sometimes with the auditorium curtains and gym curtains you know, they do some of that too,” he said.

Sheridan has done various jobs for many schools. Before working inside LHS, he was a heavy equipment operator across the street at LPS Grounds Department. People would think that Sheridan’s office should be across the street at the Grounds Department but the reason why Sheridan’s works in the basement at LHS instead is because, “This here [workshop] is set up for what I do. They don’t have a set up across the street for that,” Sheridan said.

The athletic department is also very thankful for him because Sheridan does the job that not many do and that helps save money. Pat Gatzmeyer who is an athletic director here at LHS said, “Dan Sheridan does a lot of different things for the school district, and we always appreciate the fact that when we need things repaired in athletics, that he is able to do all the little things that we need done. The types of repairs that he does and that he finishes for us are things most people don’t want to do. So whether it involves some sewing, fixing a wind screen, redoing a tarp, fixing a cover for something, he always takes care of all those things and it’s the little processes and when he does them he cares about them, and that’s what we like the most about him is that he takes his time to do it the right way.”

You can and Sheridan’s work in almost every high school and middle school in LPS. His work does not go unnoticed, and we appreciate every bit of work he has done for LHS and all the other LPS schools he has done work for.

So the next time you see athletic equipment that has been repaired, think about the man in the basement, and give thanks for his hard, solitary work.