Brady Krachey will not soon forget the opportunity to stand on Lambeau Field Sunday afternoon to watch his beloved Green Bay Packers.
Krachey, a Wauzeka-Stueben High School freshman, was one of 10 students of Jolene Mitchell's Health and Wellness class who earned a trip to Lambeau Field as part of the NFL Play 60 program.
"Your heart was racing, you were shivering because you were just so nervous to go out there," Krachey said. "Hearing the roar of 70,000 people when (Packers quarterback) Aaron Rodgers and (Packers wide receiver) Donald Driver came out, it just shook you. It was an experience of a lifetime."
The students stood on Lambeau Field prior to the National Anthem of Sunday's game between the Packers and the Oakland Raiders.
"We got to walk out of the tunnel that the Packers walked out of," Jonah Huber said. "We were down there lined up on the goal line and saw (Packers linebacker) A.J. Hawk, he waved at us and gave us a thumbs up. We were down there when the jets flew over and all of that, it was pretty cool. Just being there with all of our friends was pretty cool."
Wauzeka-Steuben was one of five schools in Wisconsin chosen for the award by the NFL. The class won eight tickets and also received a $1,000 grant from the Milk Marketing Board.
"We had to figure out what are we going to do with (with needing) two extra tickets," Mitchell said. "Krachey's BP donated four tickets, so we were able to take two more kids and two chaperones. All 12 of us went and nobody had to pay anything. I think they had a great time."
The National Dairy Council and the NFL partner up to for the NFL Play 60. The NFL is charge of the activities such as staying fit, staying exercised. The National Dairy Council is interested in students eating healthy portions.
Mitchell was approached at the beginning of the school year by a representative of the Milk Marketing Board asking if her students wanted to do a commercial on the importance on being active for 60 minutes a day.
Mitchell decided to go ahead with the project for her kids and started working on the commercial the next week.
"The commercial was due Oct. 10, so we only had three weeks to do this commercial and this was an every other day class," Mitchell said. "We had 10 class periods from the start of the commercial to the end of the commercial. It was crunch time."
For the commercial, the students made fruit kabobs for the first graders to come in, try them out and say why it was healthy for them. The students also did Pilates and Tae-Bo and also stressed drinking chocolate milk.
The class also has a health-related trivia question each month. Mitchell also made this a class assignment regardless if the kids won the prize or not.
"I think it teaches them if they truly want to work hard and want to achieve something, they can," Mitchell said. "Because when we first started doing the commercial nobody, including myself, thought it was possible to win those tickets."
And there were some trying times during the project.
"It was fun, but it took a lot of effort to get it together," Tyler Atkinson said. "We don't get along all that great sometimes, but when you start working together it really helped the process of it all."
The class meets every other day, so there were just 10 class periods to put the commercial together. The students didn't stop there.
"There were kids that came in after school, there's kids that came in on Saturday morning," Mitchell said. "A bunch of us came in and we put in a lot of extra time. It pays off."
After waiting to see if they won, the decision was delivered to Mitchell via e-mail during the first week of November.
Mitchell made sure she received school approval first before making the announcement and then a little disbelief before pandemonium set.
"They all started hugging each other, they're jumping around, hooting and hollering," Mitchell said. "Their first reaction was they didn't believe me, they thought I was teasing them and joking with them. They didn't believe me. I got the e-mail and printed off the e-mail and showed them the e-mail, so once the read the e-mail, they all knew it was for real."
The kids experienced the thrill of making it to one of NFL's most storied stadiums through their cooperation of the program. Now, Mitchell is going to make sure she stresses the importance of still doing the trivia contests and focusing on fitness activities to keep her students healthy for her lives.
"We're going to continue to do those things," Mitchell said. "We're leaving our milk posters up for the school year. It's going to be hard, but we'll still do it, we'll have to."
The kids still will cherish the experience of watching their favorite football team play - not a bad price to pay for being healthy.
"It's fun to go and see all of the atmosphere at Lambeau Field," Atkinson said. "It took awhile, but we worked together with our friends and tried to accomplish something (we) really wanted."