Their Field of Dreams

By Kim Underwood, WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL—Leigh Ellen Joyce and Derek Spencer were married June 6 at their second home — the football field at West Forsyth High School.
As students at West, both spent a lot of time on the field. Spencer, who graduated in 1996, wore No. 6 playing cornerback and receiver for the football team.
Joyce, who graduated in 2001, was a cheerleader.

Even before that, though, the field was a part of their lives. Joyce’s father, Dick Joyce, thoroughly enjoys high-school football, and he began bringing the family to West football games when Joyce was 4.

“We went to every game,” Joyce said.

Harsh conditions weren’t grounds for missing a game. As Joyce remembers it, whenever she would say, “Mama, I can’t feel my toes,” they would buy her a cup of hot chocolate.
Her two older brothers, David and Brad, went to West, and, along the way, her father started running the Split the Pot raffle (the winner splits the pot with the school) at football games, and he continued to do so even after his daughter graduated. “I even did that for four years after I had no kids here,” Dick Joyce said.

Spencer used to play Pop Warner football with the Lewisville Titans. The team practiced at nearby Southwest Elementary, and he would walk by the West field on his way over to a friend’s house he often visited after practice.

“It’s kind of like home out here,” Joyce said a few weeks before the wedding, as she and Spencer sat in the bleachers talking about their plan to stand in the middle of the 50-yard line to take their vows, with 300 guests seated on the field behind them.

(If it rained, the plan was to move the ceremony to the Joyces’ church — Fairview Moravian.)
Since they decided to have the ceremony there, Dick Joyce enjoyed joking about ways they could have expanded on the football motif. One suggestion he made was to have Spen­cer kick a field goal after saying “I do.”

He also made noises about broadcasting the ceremony over the public-address system.

Although Joyce and Spencer were happy to let him have his fun, location aside, it was a traditional ceremony.
Spencer also played football at Catawba College. Now 31, he is a service banker at Wachovia’s Thruway Branch. Joyce, 26, went to N.C. State and works with autistic children at ABC of North Carolina Child Development Center.

The idea of getting married on the field at West grew out of their decision to have the reception at Bridger Field House at Wake Forest’s BB&T Field. They knew they wanted to have the ceremony outside so they asked whether it would be possible to have it on the football field there.

When the answer came back “no,” Dick Joyce suggested looking into having it on the football field at West. This time, the answer was “yes.”

Although Joyce saw Spencer play football when he was at West and he is friends with her brother, Brad, the two didn’t meet until a couple of years ago.
“I never even knew what he looked like without a helmet and pads,” she said.

They met at a sports bar on a Wednesday night. Spencer said that Wednesday isn’t a night that he usually goes out, but a cousin had had a bad day so he went out with him for a drink.
There, they bumped into Joyce, who was on a first (and last) date with one of Spencer’s friends. (To jump ahead for a moment, there were no hard feelings. The friend is a groomsman.)
To make it clear that he had no interest in his friend’s date, Spencer thought it would be best to be cool to Joyce. From where she stood, he seemed downright mean.

“Every comment I made,” she said, ”he had a very sarcastic remark to make.”

“It was bad,” he said. “I put it on pretty thick.”

A couple days later, they bumped into each other again. This time was different. As they talked, they discovered that they felt the same way about such topics as the importance of family, friends and God.

“We stayed up until 5 or 6 in the morning talking,” he said. “It was really easy to be around her, we had so much in common.”

“It was the first time in years I had felt a true happiness with someone,” she said.