A massive new high school football stadium has opened in Allen, Texas. The stadium includes, among other things, an indoor practice field and a 38-foot-wide video screen. Local officials say they don't plan to recoup the costs for building the stadium, which was mainly funded by bonds, but they hope it becomes an important community landmark.
A $60 Million Palace for Texas High School Football, From his office window, Steve Williams surveyed the chaos of construction. His view consisted of rocks and dirt beneath bulldozers and cranes, but where others might see excess, he saw something brazen, bold and gloriously Texan.
The $60 million football stadium at Allen High School, where Williams is the district athletic director, was starting to take shape.
This is no ordinary stadium, in no ordinary state, where football ranks near faith and family. Super Bowl XLV will take place a short drive southwest next Sunday at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, but while the “big game” will repeatedly highlight football’s oversize importance in Texas, the folks in Allen need no reminders. Here, every game is big.
Williams — Bubba to his friends — arrived long before the boom, when Allen was more speck than sprawl, and now he cannot fathom all the fuss over this stadium, the calls from England, the Pacific Northwest, New York.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Williams said Friday. “We got a lot more interest than we thought we would.”
To the residents, who voted 63 percent in favor of a $119 million bond in May 2009, this project, which includes the stadium, an auditorium for fine arts and a service center for the district, is designed to scale. Their scale just happens to be larger than most.
Allen is the third-biggest high school in both Texas and in its area, which includes two larger schools in nearby Plano. It has more than 5,000 students in grades 9 to 12, more than 600 members in the nation’s largest high school band and a campus that spreads across 650,000 square feet.
On football Friday nights, the lucky ones fill the bleachers at the current stadium. Cars park for miles down the street, where the aroma of barbecue is the local perfume. The scene is straight from “Friday Night Lights,” the overcrowded version. Tom Westerberg, who became Allen’s head coach in 2004, said he could remember only four home defeats in his tenure.
“It’s controlled chaos,” said Anthony Gibson, the school’s fine arts director. “There’s an energy you can’t describe. When they say football is like religion in Texas, it’s true. From little kids all the way to the Super Bowl, we do football right.”
This big town started small, with one street, Main Street, and an annual parade that marched up, turned around and marched back. Bob Curtis, who recently retired as the district’s facilities director, was born in Allen, lived here all his life. As a teenager, he delivered groceries, and the customers left their doors unlocked and money on the kitchen counter. He stocked the cupboards and left change.
When Curtis played football in the early 1960s, Allen’s population hovered around 650, 18 of whom were in his high school graduating class. Williams arrived soon after and found a small community that farmed cotton and was centered on the high school.
On at least two occasions, the school district nearly closed for lack of students, of all reasons. When the community rallied, it learned important lessons, and Williams believes that those lessons allowed Allen to retain its small-town feel even as it grew to a population of more than 85,000. The world’s largest small town, Gibson called it.
These days, Allen is a relatively affluent suburb north of Dallas, with a professional hockey team (the Americans of the Central Hockey League), a church seemingly on every corner, several strip malls and rows and rows of brick houses, which line the subdivisions that dominate the landscape.
The high school, which more closely resembles a small college, remains the centerpiece. Its athletic center contains the football team’s offices, an indoor practice field, a weight room, a film room and separate locker rooms for football, soccer, basketball and track. A picture on the wall near the expansive trophy case features the students who accepted college athletic scholarships last year — 44 of them.
Chances are, most of them frequented Eagle Designs, a souvenir shop owned by Chris Tripucka, a transplanted Jets fan from New Jersey. His brother Kelly played in the N.B.A. Their father, Frank, played in the N.F.L. Chris played football at Boston College, and wears a Cotton Bowl ring as proof.
His shop overflowed with T-shirts, hats, helmets, jackets and pajama pants, all in the high school colors, blue and red. If his store is not a testament to the power of football in Texas, the fact that two other similar stores exist in Allen is.
“I’ve been around sports all my life,” Tripucka said. “You can’t explain it to people who don’t live here. You have to experience it.”
Since 1976, the experience took place at 601 East Main Street. Allen Eagle Stadium, with its faded artificial turf and portable bleachers that bring its capacity to 14,200, sits there, near a restaurant called Bar-B-Cutie. For years, administrators wanted to build a larger stadium, but first they constructed schools to keep pace with the growth. Curtis, the facilities director for 32 years, said, “The stadium is long overdue.”
Parking and season tickets rank as the current stadium’s biggest challenges. The builders could have never anticipated Allen’s growth, the 8,000 fans who travel to away games, the 3,000 students who participate in home games, in football, in band, as spectators.
Some families have held season tickets for 25 or 30 years. Their children graduated, moved, had their own children, but the families kept the tickets for the town’s marquee Friday night events. New residents scramble for season tickets. Before this season, roughly 400 families entered a lottery for 70 available seats.
Even parents of band members complain about the seating. About 100 of them are volunteers, in part because they receive sideline access for games. And the team, the band, the spectators continue to grow. Band members alone consume 2,000 bottles of water every game. Imagine the bathroom lines that result.
Williams believes the new stadium will solve those issues. It will hold 18,000 spectators in a sunken bowl designed to improve sightlines. The stadium will include a two-tier press box, an indoor golf practice area, a high-definition video scoreboard, a practice room for wrestling, and enough parking for every car in Dallas, or close.
“Look, football has always been a big deal here,” Williams said. “This is Texas. But this bond project is about much more than football. It’s about our school, our community.”
“It’s about tra-di-tion,” he added, accentuating the syllables.
Inside the athletic center, the trophy case includes the centerpiece plaque from the 2008 Class 5A football championship, as well as awards for other sports like wrestling and girls’ golf. That speaks to Williams’s point, and Allen ranks among the state’s top academic schools. To some, however, the stadium project will always embody excess simply because of its size and cost. In fact, with significant education cuts looming across the state, Allen anticipates an increasingly negative reaction as the stadium nears completion, with its first game scheduled for August 2012. Yet Tim Carroll, a district spokesman, said he had received few calls critical of the project. He expects that to change, if only somewhat.
Most here are Cowboys fans who plan to participate in the Super Bowl festivities, if only because this is football, and this is Texas. Their monument to their favorite sport is a smaller version of the Jerry Jones-built palace that will host the Super Bowl next Sunday between Pittsburgh and Green Bay.
Up the road, in a state known for and defined by size, Allen is building perhaps the most impressive high school stadium. But it will not be the state’s biggest. At least four high school stadiums are larger.
A $60 Million Palace for Texas High School Football, From his office window, Steve Williams surveyed the chaos of construction. His view consisted of rocks and dirt beneath bulldozers and cranes, but where others might see excess, he saw something brazen, bold and gloriously Texan.
The $60 million football stadium at Allen High School, where Williams is the district athletic director, was starting to take shape.
This is no ordinary stadium, in no ordinary state, where football ranks near faith and family. Super Bowl XLV will take place a short drive southwest next Sunday at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, but while the “big game” will repeatedly highlight football’s oversize importance in Texas, the folks in Allen need no reminders. Here, every game is big.
Williams — Bubba to his friends — arrived long before the boom, when Allen was more speck than sprawl, and now he cannot fathom all the fuss over this stadium, the calls from England, the Pacific Northwest, New York.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Williams said Friday. “We got a lot more interest than we thought we would.”
To the residents, who voted 63 percent in favor of a $119 million bond in May 2009, this project, which includes the stadium, an auditorium for fine arts and a service center for the district, is designed to scale. Their scale just happens to be larger than most.
Allen is the third-biggest high school in both Texas and in its area, which includes two larger schools in nearby Plano. It has more than 5,000 students in grades 9 to 12, more than 600 members in the nation’s largest high school band and a campus that spreads across 650,000 square feet.
On football Friday nights, the lucky ones fill the bleachers at the current stadium. Cars park for miles down the street, where the aroma of barbecue is the local perfume. The scene is straight from “Friday Night Lights,” the overcrowded version. Tom Westerberg, who became Allen’s head coach in 2004, said he could remember only four home defeats in his tenure.
“It’s controlled chaos,” said Anthony Gibson, the school’s fine arts director. “There’s an energy you can’t describe. When they say football is like religion in Texas, it’s true. From little kids all the way to the Super Bowl, we do football right.”
This big town started small, with one street, Main Street, and an annual parade that marched up, turned around and marched back. Bob Curtis, who recently retired as the district’s facilities director, was born in Allen, lived here all his life. As a teenager, he delivered groceries, and the customers left their doors unlocked and money on the kitchen counter. He stocked the cupboards and left change.
When Curtis played football in the early 1960s, Allen’s population hovered around 650, 18 of whom were in his high school graduating class. Williams arrived soon after and found a small community that farmed cotton and was centered on the high school.
On at least two occasions, the school district nearly closed for lack of students, of all reasons. When the community rallied, it learned important lessons, and Williams believes that those lessons allowed Allen to retain its small-town feel even as it grew to a population of more than 85,000. The world’s largest small town, Gibson called it.
These days, Allen is a relatively affluent suburb north of Dallas, with a professional hockey team (the Americans of the Central Hockey League), a church seemingly on every corner, several strip malls and rows and rows of brick houses, which line the subdivisions that dominate the landscape.
The high school, which more closely resembles a small college, remains the centerpiece. Its athletic center contains the football team’s offices, an indoor practice field, a weight room, a film room and separate locker rooms for football, soccer, basketball and track. A picture on the wall near the expansive trophy case features the students who accepted college athletic scholarships last year — 44 of them.
Chances are, most of them frequented Eagle Designs, a souvenir shop owned by Chris Tripucka, a transplanted Jets fan from New Jersey. His brother Kelly played in the N.B.A. Their father, Frank, played in the N.F.L. Chris played football at Boston College, and wears a Cotton Bowl ring as proof.
His shop overflowed with T-shirts, hats, helmets, jackets and pajama pants, all in the high school colors, blue and red. If his store is not a testament to the power of football in Texas, the fact that two other similar stores exist in Allen is.
“I’ve been around sports all my life,” Tripucka said. “You can’t explain it to people who don’t live here. You have to experience it.”
Since 1976, the experience took place at 601 East Main Street. Allen Eagle Stadium, with its faded artificial turf and portable bleachers that bring its capacity to 14,200, sits there, near a restaurant called Bar-B-Cutie. For years, administrators wanted to build a larger stadium, but first they constructed schools to keep pace with the growth. Curtis, the facilities director for 32 years, said, “The stadium is long overdue.”
Parking and season tickets rank as the current stadium’s biggest challenges. The builders could have never anticipated Allen’s growth, the 8,000 fans who travel to away games, the 3,000 students who participate in home games, in football, in band, as spectators.
Some families have held season tickets for 25 or 30 years. Their children graduated, moved, had their own children, but the families kept the tickets for the town’s marquee Friday night events. New residents scramble for season tickets. Before this season, roughly 400 families entered a lottery for 70 available seats.
Even parents of band members complain about the seating. About 100 of them are volunteers, in part because they receive sideline access for games. And the team, the band, the spectators continue to grow. Band members alone consume 2,000 bottles of water every game. Imagine the bathroom lines that result.
Williams believes the new stadium will solve those issues. It will hold 18,000 spectators in a sunken bowl designed to improve sightlines. The stadium will include a two-tier press box, an indoor golf practice area, a high-definition video scoreboard, a practice room for wrestling, and enough parking for every car in Dallas, or close.
“Look, football has always been a big deal here,” Williams said. “This is Texas. But this bond project is about much more than football. It’s about our school, our community.”
“It’s about tra-di-tion,” he added, accentuating the syllables.
Inside the athletic center, the trophy case includes the centerpiece plaque from the 2008 Class 5A football championship, as well as awards for other sports like wrestling and girls’ golf. That speaks to Williams’s point, and Allen ranks among the state’s top academic schools. To some, however, the stadium project will always embody excess simply because of its size and cost. In fact, with significant education cuts looming across the state, Allen anticipates an increasingly negative reaction as the stadium nears completion, with its first game scheduled for August 2012. Yet Tim Carroll, a district spokesman, said he had received few calls critical of the project. He expects that to change, if only somewhat.
Most here are Cowboys fans who plan to participate in the Super Bowl festivities, if only because this is football, and this is Texas. Their monument to their favorite sport is a smaller version of the Jerry Jones-built palace that will host the Super Bowl next Sunday between Pittsburgh and Green Bay.
Up the road, in a state known for and defined by size, Allen is building perhaps the most impressive high school stadium. But it will not be the state’s biggest. At least four high school stadiums are larger.