Virtual Tour: New $60 Million Stadium at Allen High School in Allen …
- Sign Up
- Login
High School Football
$72 Million for a High School Stadium? In Texas, It's Only Up from There
Natalie Weiner @ natalieweiner Staff WriterAugust 25, 2017
LM Otero/Associated Press
“We’re out on the field getting the Tigers ready for another successful run at a state title,” chirps the voicemail for the Katy High School athletics department.
Before being asked to leave your “growl” and “pawprint,” you’ll learn what the school’s marching band sounds like, the number of national (three) and state (eight) football championships the Tigers have won and that Gary Joseph serves as both the head of the athletic department and the head football coach—all without anyone answering the phone.
It’s an understatement to say football is important to the Houston suburb, and if the impressive voicemail greeting doesn’t convince you, consider the $72 million the district just spent on a new stadium. Yes, for high schoolers.
Legacy Stadium is the most expensive stadium in Texas (and thus, U.S.) high school history. It’s the latest entrant in what the local media refers to as a stadium “ arms race .”
The 12,000-seat stadium, complete with luxury boxes and a giant video replay board (which alone cost $2 million ), was built alongside the district’s old stadium (est. 1981) to provide for its eight high schools, each of which have around 3,000 students.
“Everybody in this community agreed that another stadium was needed—there was just a difference of agreement, maybe, on the cost and the size of the stadium,” Katy Independent School District Superintendent Dr. Lance Hindt told press before the stadium’s opening, alluding to the possibility that the end cost was higher than the $58 million bond approved by taxpayers in 2014 .
Katy is making headlines now, but bank-breaking stadiums are becoming the norm around Texas, turning the Friday night games many non-Texans imagine as a charming, pastoral tradition into big business. Most stadiums due to open in the next couple of years have $45 to $70 million price tags, and that’s before inevitable construction overages.
“High school football is bigger in the state of Texas,” says Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD athletic director Scott Lehnhoff, riffing on the cliche that probably comes to mind for many when introduced to high school athletics facilities that skew closer to ” Jerry World ” than Friday Night Lights.
“Friday nights in the state of Texas are not just a football event; they’re for the whole town.”
The indoor practice facility at Allen High SchoolLM Otero/Associated Press/Associated Press
The epicenter of luxury school stadiums is the Dallas/Fort Worth area, which can claim to have started the trend almost 20 years ago. In 1999, Birdville ISD included the state’s first video replay board in its new stadium, prompting skepticism from press and refs alike (the latter were concerned in-game replays would affect their ability to officiate).
Mark Thomas, now Birdville’s communications officer, was a teacher at the time. “It didn’t cost taxpayer dollars—it was through sponsorships,” he says of the screen, which measured (modest by today’s standards) 100 square feet. “At first the coaches had to work to keep the students focused—like, ‘Play the game; don’t watch yourself on the TV.'”
Thomas says it wasn’t long before the next school came along with something bigger and better, which he attributes to the decreasing cost of Jumbotron technology. “As other people see your design and improve on it,” he says, “you start to think, ‘Wow, I wish we’d done things this way.'”
Alan Galbreath @ AlanGalbreathTX
Bowie Football gets to open Pflugerville's new stadium this Fall in Week 1. Cool opportunity to get the W. https://t.co/Liqs6F5G4O
Today, video replay boards are everywhere , most running in the half-million-dollar range. To stand out, you have to take things higher, like 735-student Carthage High School did in 2013 when it paid $750,000 for a 1,200-square-foot screen. At the time, it was the state’s largest. When asked whether it still held that title, the screen’s manufacturer, Nevco, said it wasn’t sure, but that by now there was “probably a bigger one.”
The town’s population is 6,856 , with a median household income of around $47,000 . In contrast, families in the Katy ISD have a median household income of over $100,000 —and the district is still in debt . “Back then, people probably thought we were spending a lot of money,” Thomas says. “But today, you look back and it’s like, we hardly spent anything.”
Allen High SchoolLM Otero/Associated Press
Stadium spending puts Texas’ rapidly changing demographics into perspective. Big numbers anywhere in the state draw headlines, but in the Houston and Dallas suburbs, school boards can justify the cost as a response to a dramatic increase in population. The metro areas are the No. 1 and 2 fastest-growing in America, respectively.
Outlying suburbs that used to be one-horse towns are exploding into small cities of their own. But in tiny places like Carthage, the high price of keeping up with the big dogs is a harder sell.
“A better example of how big this trend is [is] my town—Dripping Springs, about 30 minutes southwest of Austin,” says Brian DeMarco, retired NFL offensive lineman and CEO of TexasHSFootball.com. “The census had us at about 2,500 people, and they built an $18 million high school stadium. For 2,500 people.”
Dallas, though, is still the center of the state’s high school football community and, thanks to its prosperous northern suburbs, home to some of the most eye-popping stadium price tags.
“It’s a whole different world from the rest of the state, just as far as understanding what a big role athletics can play in your school culture,” says Jeff Fleener, current head coach at Mesquite High School and former offensive coordinator at Allen High School, home to both Texas’ top-ranked football team and what’s generally cited as its first blockbuster Friday night cathedral.
Allen’s Eagle Stadium, which seats 18,000 and cost $60 million, opened in 2012 to considerable attention from the national media . It didn’t help that less than two years later the stadium’s foundation was already cracking , and it had to be shut down more than a year for repairs.
Katy ISD Athletics @ KatyISDAthletic
Katy ISD Community, we are ready for stadium tours! Field dedication is tonight at 7:30! https://t.co/uG2CZSx3Ol
Lost in the fray is that Allen is the largest high school in Texas, with a whopping 6,500 students. “The old stadium was seriously undersized,” says Fleener, who coached at the school from 2006 to 2014. “The district was spending massive amounts of money to bring in extra bleachers, and there were still people who wouldn’t fit.”
He compares Allen’s enthusiasm for its high school football team to Green Bay’s passion for the Packers. Even in the enlarged stadium, the entire home side is made up of season ticket holders. And in a town with a population under 100,000, there’s a waitlist.
“If you talk to the community, you’re going to get a bunch of people who don’t understand why everybody’s up in arms about it,” Fleener adds. “They love it.”
Allen High SchoolLM Otero/Associated Press
That’s the same argument being made at Allen’s rival McKinney, the next North Dallas suburb slated to debut a costly new stadium in 2018. Right now, the stadium’s sticker price is $70 million , and it’s still six months before the slated completion date.
“Most of the people that have an issue with this are not McKinneyites,” says McKinney Superintendent Rick McDaniel. “It’s people that see it from a distance, who don’t understand the significance of this gathering place for our community.”
Allen, McKinney and Frisco—a school district whose field is part of the Dallas Cowboys’ predictably opulent, brand-new practice facility—are all within about a 15-mile radius and have median household incomes in the $80,000 to $115,000 range. For these districts, consistently ranked among the best in Texas, a grand football stadium is the icing on the already-solid infrastructure.
“If people were to visit McKinney, they’d see that we have state-of-the-art academic facilities at every turn,” McDaniel says. “Everything is top-notch, and this is just another piece of that puzzle—not forgoing any of that just to have a good football stadium.”
McKinney’s well-funded school system is an aberration in Texas, whose schools rank No. 41 in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report . The district’s ability to invest in new facilities will allow it to bring in revenue via corporate sponsorships (Allen’s exclusive vendors include Dr. Pepper, Chick-fil-A and Dickey’s Barbecue), ticket sales and even parking.
“What high schools have done is taken a page right out of the college and NFL playbook: If you build it, they will come—and that’s exactly what’s happening,” DeMarco says. “High school football is the highlight of the week in communities across the state of Texas, and it’s definitely a moneymaker just like it is in college and the NFL.”
The stadiums’ profit potential for each district mirrors the market the NCAA has created on a much larger scale. It also leads to many of the same questions about supporting public education via amateurism that has plagued the NCAA. As Fleener succinctly puts it, “It’s definitely one of those things that from the outside, it’s hard to understand.”
Regardless of NCAA comparisons or shocked sports fans in other parts of the country, the price of Texas high school football is going to keep going up. “The reality is, we’re booming in North Texas,” McDaniel adds. “Whoever’s built the most recent structure like that is going to have the highest price tag.”
There is one exception. The Steele High School Knights, who play at Lehnhoff Stadium in the San Antonio suburb of Schertz, Texas, are the only top-five team in the state playing in a stadium more than 20 years old.
Though the stadium recently got a new replay board and press box, the general structure is still the same as it was when the stadium was built in 1966. Scott Lehnhoff (yes, the stadium was named for his parents) was the football coach at Steele until this year, when he was promoted to district AD.
Jake Brown @ Jake_Brown
Texas high school football stadiums: They are indeed no joke. https://t.co/L8i9U5qZRg
“For whatever reason down in San Antonio, we’re a little bit behind Dallas and Houston when it comes to facilities overall, including football stadiums,” Lehnhoff says. “Are they necessary? I don’t think so. What’s a need, and what’s a want? The vast majority of our community believes that our dollars can be spent elsewhere to benefit our students a little bit better.”
Schertz is in the top tier of Texas school districts, and its football team is a perennial contender for the state title. But do its athletes ever feel outclassed by the supersized stadiums they visit on the road?
“‘Oh, Coach, this is nice—you think we’ll ever have something like this?’ I’ve had those conversations,” Lehnhoff says.
“But at the same time, as old as our stadium is and the lack of flash that it has, on Friday nights, it’s still a neat environment. It’s crowded—that’s what kids notice more than anything. A big stadium with a bunch of empty seats doesn’t have much feel to it. I think it’s more about the atmosphere of a Friday night.”
Related
Why Is This 350-Pound QB Not Getting D-I Offers?
High School Football
Why Is This 350-Pound QB Not Getting D-I Offers?
Adam Kramer
via Bleacher Report
All-Stars + Real-Life Heroes = Life-Changing Moments
High School Football
All-Stars + Real-Life Heroes = Life-Changing Moments
Bleacherreport
via Bleacherreport
Mahomes, Mayfield, Brees: Texas QBs Having Their Moment
High School Football
Mahomes, Mayfield, Brees: Texas QBs Having Their Moment
Adam Teicher
via ESPN.com
St. John Bosco, Mater Dei Prevail to Set Up No. 1 vs. No. 2 in HS Football
High School Football
St. John Bosco, Mater Dei Prevail to Set Up No. 1 vs. No. 2 in HS Football
Mitch Stephens
via MaxPreps.com
Are You Ready for Some Football?
Allen High School is a study in bigness: A 5,000-student campus with a 650-member marching band supporting a football team that draws 8,000 fans to away games. And now — the pinnacle of suburban spoils — the Collin County community will break ground on an 18,000-seat stadium, the largest occupied by a single team. Pricetag: $60 million.
by Morgan Smith
Republish
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/images/allenhighschoolcollage_.jpg)
Graphic by Jacqueline Mermea
Drive north of Dallas on Highway 75 and after about 25 miles you’ll find Allen, where a suburb that grew up in the boom of the late-’90s telecommunications juggernaut is just entering its prime. Down a road framed by tennis courts and endless parking lots, on the other side of a traffic circle, is an imposing red brick school building that dominates an otherwise bleached landscape of oatmeal-colored sidewalk, gray pavement and drab green athletic fields. On a day near the end of the school year, the heat of midsummer is already in the air, interrupted only briefly by gusts of wind that blow forcefully across the flat North Texas terrain of Collin County .
This is Allen High School , home of the Eagles and a study in bigness: a 5,000-student campus, with a 650-member marching band, the nation’s largest, supporting a football team that draws 8,000 fans to away games. And now — the pinnacle of the community’s collection of suburban spoils — Allen will break ground on an 18,000-seat palace of a stadium. Though only the fifth-largest high school football stadium in Texas, it’s the largest that will be occupied by a single team. Of course, it carries a big price tag: $60 million, approved as part of a $120 million bond initiative that also includes new performing arts and transportation service centers. Voters approved the measure 63 percent to 37 percent in 2009, a year after the Eagles won their first state football championship.
Still, Allen High head football coach Tom Westerberg says he “wouldn’t say that football is the main thing in town or anything like that.”
“People attend everything. It’s not just football,” he says. “People try to compare it to Friday Night Lights and all the stuff that happened back in the ’70s and ’80s in Odessa, but it’s not like that everywhere.”
The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one .
Collin County residents have the highest median income in the state — it’s one of the 25 wealthiest counties in the country. But you won’t find the sprawling lawns and century-old homes of Highland Park or River Oaks here. The treasures are more attainable: rows of spacious, neatly plotted ranch-style houses under black roofs of the kind that look identical from the air; an outdoor shopping mall complete with its own lake that boasts a P.F. Chang’s and a Cheesecake Factory; an array of parks and hiking trails; a community event center with its own ice rink.
Soon the stadium will be the main attraction, though folks outside of Allen are talking more about it than folks here, who take the expense and size wholly in stride. Many give a wary response like Westerberg’s — and pointedly observe that it won’t even be the largest high school stadium in Texas. That’s because as news spread of its cost, outlets including Sports Illustrated and ESPN ran items on the stadium, stinging a conservative community with unwanted national attention.
“People will tell you it’s all about football, because we’re big and we’ve won,” says AHS athletic director Steve Williams. “This is not a community that is football-obsessed. When you become successful at something, you immediately become accused of paying too much attention to it, usually from people who lost to you. We’re not that way.”
Outsiders assume, for instance, that football trumps academics at Allen High and that building a megaschool (with the huge sports recruiting pool it creates) all goes back to football — so the stadium must be a monument to misplaced priorities. But there’s no sign of trouble in the school’s academic performance; it ranks among the best schools in Texas.
Williams emphasizes that the stadium will include facilities for other sports, like locker rooms for the golf team and a place to hold wrestling (which, in his deep drawl, comes out as “wrassling”) matches. From the window in his second-floor office, he’ll be able to see it all or, as he jokes, “the back of a scoreboard.” Right now, the view is of an expanse of tawny, overgrown grass that hints at the farmland Williams said it was when he first arrived in Allen in 1975.
The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one .
The facility was no impulse buy. Allen Independent School District set that land aside in 1995 specifically for a football stadium, to be built when the district reached full enrollment levels. That time has come. Since 1995, the school has grown more than 200 percent, from a K-12 enrollment of 6,800 students to its current 21,000.
“I think Allen is a unique place, and it’s hard for people in other parts of the country to understand its size and scale,” says Allen Independent School District spokesman Tim Carroll, who said he handled around 40 media inquiries in a span of three days when the story blew up. “But they have to understand that Allen has a high school of 5,000 students.”
“A lot of teams hate us”
At the same time the school’s planning group chose to reserve the land outside Williams’ office for a stadium, it decided that the district would only have one high school, which is now the third-largest in the state. (The high schools with the four largest enrollments in Texas — Plano and Plano East, in front of Allen with just over 5,000 students, and Plano West, behind it with just under 5,000 — are in Collin County, which is second only to Dallas County as the fastest-growing county in the state.)
The plan for one big school stemmed from a desire to “avoid inequitable distribution of resources, of programs, have a sense of pride in one place, avoid an East/West divide,” says Superintendent Ken Helvey, who has lived in Allen since 2001 and has held the school district’s top job since 2006. “You wanted equitable opportunities for every child to engage in a quality education. That was really a big push, and it looked like from the standpoint of the enrollment projections that it could be done.”
According to Helvey, AISD is done growing. Its 28 square miles are landlocked on all four sides by Plano, Frisco, McKinney and Lovejoy, allowing the district to plan carefully for growth and infrastructure.
Leica Smith, who owns A-Town Sports, the local spirit store that sells Eagles-themed clothing, and whose two sons played football at Allen, says she was initially against Allen ISD’s decision to have a single high school. She worried about how large it would get. Now she just loves it, because the economies of scale ensure kids don’t get cut out of extracurricular activities.
It’s no secret that the large size, and the money that comes with it, allows the football team to pound opponents into the turf, as it often does. Smith says she regularly hears of families moving to the district in junior high so their kids can play football in high school. She herself moved to Allen in 1994 because she wanted a “small-town experience” for her kids, though she says “that’s not really happened” because of the area’s rapid development.
The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one .
Smith’s youngest son, Tracey — who was a defensive lineman on the team that won the 2008 state championship — acknowledged the perception that its football might is connected to Allen’s size and affluence.
“A lot of teams hate us,” he says. “I guess, just being Allen, we have a lot more advantages. Some of our facilities are nice, and we only have one school, and a lot of people think we wouldn’t be as good if we had to split up schools. We’re always doing well each year, so we basically have enemies all over the map.”
His mother also shrugs off any suggestion of the new stadium’s extravagance. “That’s what it costs to build stuff nowadays,” she says in her no-nonsense, animated way. “I know there’s a recession going on, but hey, how many people are going to be put to work on that stadium? And it was voted on — we all wanted it. Maybe they keep their opinions to themselves, but I have not heard anyone come in here and complain about it.”
“People like to win”
It’s true that the stadium, despite its jaw-dropping cost and size, won’t even be the largest in Texas when it’s completed in 2012. That honor goes to San Antonio’s Alamo Stadium, a Works Progress Administration project finished in 1940 that seats 23,000. After Alamo, two other stadiums hold 20,000 or more: Pizza Hut Park in neighboring Frisco, which was built in 2005 as a joint project between the county, the city, the school district and a private operator at a cost of $80 million; and Mesquite’s Memorial Stadium, built in 1977.
Farrington Field in Forth Worth and Corpus Christi’s Buccaneer Stadium both rival Allen, with capacities of 18,500 and 18,000, respectively. But all those stadiums serve multiple teams, often all the teams in a district. Allen’s is the home of the Eagles, period.
According to Bob McSpadden, who runs the eponymous TexasBob.com , a site that includes a huge repository of stadium stats, one of the “first really big-dollar stadiums” was Odessa’s Ratliff Stadium, which was built in 1982 and has a capacity that hovers just under 18,000.
“Everyone was aghast; it was unbelievable that they would build a stadium like that for a high school,” says McSpadden, who came of age there during the 1960s — though he was part of the band, not the football team — and currently works in Houston as an adviser for Shell Oil Company. “It’s still one of the largest stadiums in the state and it’s still a very nice stadium to go to, but now it’s old hat.” Still, McSpadden says he occasionally makes the nine-hour drive to Odessa to attend games.
Ratliff was built shortly after Odessa’s Permian High School (the subject of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, which was made into a film and is now a television series ) had a string of state championships in the 1970s. McSpadden says selling a stadium with a hefty price tag to voters is easier because of the revenue a state championship can bring into a school district through ticket sales.
“There’s always additional monies afterwards. Any player will tell you the best year to play on a team is after a championship, because you get new uniforms and equipment,” he says. “It’s also a pride factor. You can’t get around that. People like to win.”
Districts can also push stadiums on the basis that they will eventually pay for themselves through advertisements or naming rights. (Carroll, the Allen ISD spokesman, says the prospect of selling the naming rights to the new stadium has not been discussed.) Districts usually pay for bond initiatives like the one in Allen over a period of 15 to 20 years — with interest — through increases in property taxes.
But because of the condition of Allen’s current stadium, one McSpadden says has “a sorry reputation,” superintendent Helvey says the $60 million price wasn’t hard for voters to swallow.
“The fact that this facility was needed was a question that was settled years ago,” he says. “So it wasn’t a hard sell to say, ‘Do we really need an 18,000-seat stadium?’ Plus, I don’t think anybody could have envisioned 600, 700 members in a marching band.”
The school currently rents an additional 7,000 seats worth of portable bleachers to house fans on Friday nights, in a stadium built in 1976 to hold 7,000 people. That’s still not enough to accommodate demand for tickets — one parent camped out for two days for a chance to snag some of the rare season tickets that were free at the beginning of this year and still didn’t get them. Others must navigate an elaborate barter system that emerges when people suspect a family might be ready to relinquish theirs. Even though her son will play football at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania this fall, Smith says she’s keeping her tickets in Allen.
“People don’t give them up. They just don’t. I’m not giving mine up. Even though my son’s going off to college, I’m just not. And I’ve had a parent with an upcoming football player say, ‘Hey, are you going to give up your tickets?’ And I said ‘No, but I’ll let you use them every now and then,’” she says, sitting in her office in front of a framed needlepoint on the wall that reads, “Faith … makes things possible, not easy.”
Smith says that after his team won state, the way Tracey was recruited made her realize that “there’s just nothing in the world like football in Texas” — scouts eyed her son she says, like “he’s a prize bull over at the stockyards or something.” And when his new teammates at Bucknell saw his state championship ring, “they were just in awe.”
“The college kids were just like wow — because it’s Texas. It’s a Texas 5A championship. It’s like the best of the best.”
Texas Tribune donors or members may be quoted or mentioned in our stories, or may be the subject of them. For a complete list of contributors, click here .
Quality journalism doesn’t come free
Perhaps it goes without saying — but producing quality journalism isn’t cheap. At a time when newsroom resources and revenue across the country are declining, The Texas Tribune remains committed to sustaining our mission : creating a more engaged and informed Texas with every story we cover, every event we convene and every newsletter we send. As a nonprofit newsroom, we rely on members to help keep our stories free and our events open to the public. Do you value our journalism? Show us with your support.
Yes, I’ll donate today
Hide all comments
Comment Policy
The Texas Tribune is pleased to provide the opportunity for you to share your observations about this story. We encourage lively debate on the issues of the day, but we ask that you refrain from using profanity or other offensive speech, engaging in personal attacks or name-calling, posting advertising, or wandering away from the topic at hand. To comment, you must be a registered user of the Tribune, and your real name will be displayed. All comments are shown in Central Time. Thanks for taking time to offer your thoughts.