Pretty incredible that high school can/will host a collegiate championship game...pretty sure the taxpayers were fleeced for a $70m stadium!


Excerpt:
The Division 2 football national championship game is relocating to the state of Texas for the first time in over 30 years. The Lone Star Conference will be the host conference for the championship game, which will be played in McKinney Independent School District Stadium, a luxury 12,000 thousand seat high school football stadium that cost $70 million to build.
Link

Only 12,000 seats in a city of 168,000 in Texas?

Some towns in West Texas have stadiums with seating capacities larger than their population.

quote:

Originally posted by tatortodd:
Only 12,000 seats in a city of 168,000 in Texas?

Some towns in West Texas have stadiums with seating capacities larger than their population.

Some towns in West Texas don't have very big populations....

flashguy

In Texas, your HS stadium should be larger than the nearest college stadium. Everything’s bigger in ....

The DALLAS area HS stadiums of McKinney, Allen, Southlake, Highland Park are truly something to experience, all larger than my Division I. college stadium.

quote:

Originally posted by tatortodd:
Only 12,000 seats in a city of 168,000 in Texas?

Some towns in West Texas have stadiums with seating capacities larger than their population.

Its D2 football. Bet they don't even fill the 12k seats.

I'll take that bet. Rabid football fans in my old home town + a ton of civic pride. No doubt in my mind it will sell out.

quote:

Originally posted by elde:
I'll take that bet. Rabid football fans in my old home town + a ton of civic pride. No doubt in my mind it will sell out.

Would love to know which of us turned out to be right.

Its nicer than my alma mater's stadium.

We went to our first game there last Friday, I call it the Taj of Ignorance, for $70m I should not have to pay $8 per seat.

What a waste, they wrapped the school improvement bond in with this monstrosity....I did not vote for it.

It is pretty nice though better than the university ones where I grew up.

quote:

Originally posted by dewhorse:
We went to our first game there last Friday, I call it the Taj of Ignorance, for $70m I should not have to pay $8 per seat.

What a waste, they wrapped the school improvement bond in with this monstrosity....I did not vote for it.

It is pretty nice though better than the university ones where I grew up.

It’s frustrating to me to see the amount of money spent on athletics, often passed by bonds here in Texas, in a way that is very hard to defeat at the ballot box because everyone likes to vote for free stuff...that’s not free!

I guess that’s why it was wrapped in with other things...the only way to get it passed.

i am a football fan but i have to say that stadium is obscene

the student-athlete experience in this country has gotten out of control

should be minor league PRO teams (basketball / football developmental leagues) - paying the participants UP FRONT / above-board for those interested and schools should get back to academics and admitting ONLY those students who can gain admittance on academic merit - sports as an intramural / regional activity for actual STUDENT-athletes

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There's a good chance my alma mater's school will be one of the teams showing up for that game. They make it on a regular basis. Go Eagles!

And yes, it will fill up the 12,000 seats.

Jim

When I graduated from McKinney High back in the eighties there was only one high school with around 285 in the graduating class. A $70 million stadium like that would have been unimaginable. It’s absurd but that’s the way it is now. Once a Texas high school reaches a certain size they have to have a college sized stadium.

Thats a nice stadium, especially for HS...

They have been building larger stadiums in South GA since the 60s, the James R. Hallford Stadium in Clarkston. The stadium was built in 1968 and holds 15,600, granted it's older but bigger!

In fact theres three that are over 15,000 capacity,

Link

Yes, we got raped by the voters on that one. Total waste of money on the damn thing. Has a freaking crack in it also. That part was free of charge of course. But to fix it bend over again.

McKinney is the worst at fleecing its population with school property taxes and BS bond votes like this. If we were pumping out National Merit Scholars like an assembly line, it would be worth it. But, the ones I seem to encounter give me great pause at what our schools are capable of putting out into the wild.

$70 million is stupid. But to clear up some confusion, these are regional stadiums. This isn't one high school playing a game per week on a $70M field. This is also nothing new. When I was playing middle school and HS football in the 80's we had Rhodes Stadium in Katy ISD.

Katy ISD just opened a new $70m stadium as well, to replace Rhodes that opened in 1981. It is the home field for 8 different high school teams as well as all of the middle schools that feed those high schools. The Katy stadium includes performing arts venues as well.

Katy ISD has an annual enrollment of about 70,000 kids. So one time cost is $1,000 per student for a given enrollment year. If they get 37 years out of it, like Rhodes, it's roughly $27 per student, per year.