They're Playing (High School) Football!

Texas High School Gets $60 Million Football Stadium
Dr. Wedge Buster/ThePigskinDoctors.com

Everything is bigger in Texas. And that includes high school football.

Allen High School, located in a growing suburb of Dallas, has approved the construction of a new stadium to house their football team that will break ground next month. The price tag is a whopping $60,000,000 and comes at a time when most school districts are slashing budgets just to keep their doors open.

So how does a school of 5,000 students justify a new, state-of-the-art stadium that seats 18,000 and a video scoreboard?

It’s because football is big business in Texas. Heck, they have the largest high school band with 800+ people (see video) so you can see that they go all out in Allen, Texas.

The new stadium will feature:
- Video Scoreboard
- Two level press box with film deck and Observation deck
- Home side reserved seating with seat backs
- 1,5000 additional parking spaces with 4,500 total parking spaces
- 18,000 seat Stadium with upper deck seating including:
- 5,000 reserved seating,
- 2,700 General Admission
- 4,000 Students
- 5,300 Visitor
- 1,000 Band

Their old stadium seats around 8,000 and was built 30 years ago. They bring in another 7,000 or so portable seats for fans to max it out. Many people stand to watch the game and a trip to the bathrooms can take quite awhile.

The facilities are outdated and overrun so having a new stadium constructed is not unexpected. Dropping $60 million is a little outrageous but this is the team that helped fill Texas Stadium with 50,000 last year.

And one way to look at it is that the new stadium is just half of the expenditure.

The stadium was part of a larger $120 million bond package passed in May 2009 that included nearly as much money for a state-of-the-art auditorium for performing arts.

The new Allen Eagles Stadium is set to open in 2012.

Allen High School is one of the largest schools in the state and their football team is one of the best. The Allen Eagles are winners of the Texas 5A state title and finished as the No. 2 team in the RivalsHigh Top 100 football rankings in 2008.

I knew this was going to happeneventally. One of those rich school districts in East/North Texas would finally whip out the pocketbook and build a better mousetrap. In fact the only reason it took this long was because they didn't want to encur the same scorn that Odessa/Midland receives for clearly placing more emphasis on football than on anything else, athletic or academic. It's nice to see the rest of Texas is finally ready to admit it. And we don't have to suffer academically for it. We just need to get textbooks that don't refer to Martin Luther King as an uppity negro rabble rouser.

On the other hand I'm kind of sad Odessa isn't the king of high school football worship anymore. I think it's time to build the end zone sections at Ratliff, get a video screen bigger than UT's and hire the flying angels for the OHS/Permian game next year.