The arms race in college football and the NFL has been prevalent for years.
Everyone is looking for the biggest and best.
Now, that is being extended to the high school level. McKinney Independent School District became the latest in Texas to join the arms race. Voters in the school district recently approved $62.8 million for construction of a new high school stadium as part of a $220 million bond package.
That is right, in a time where public schools are struggling to pay teachers and properly educate students, there are school districts building extravagant high school stadiums that will come with all the bells and whistles like giant high-def jumbo-trons, state of the art technology and upper-deck seating. Manhattan Construction, the same company that built Houston’s NRG Stadium and Jerry Jones’ AT&T Stadium, will handle the construction of McKinney’s new stadium.
Some find this troubling as the Texas’ obsession with high school football takes center stage.
“I think that it’s not going to be a trend anywhere in the world except the state of Texas,” said Andrew Zimbalist, who is the Robert A. Woods professor of economics at Smith College and one of the country’s most prominent sports economists. “The state of Texas is renowned for having an obsession with high school football. In my view they would be wise to undo themselves of that obsession for reasons of health of the college athletes.”
The justification for the 12,000-seat stadium that is set to open in 2017 is the expectation that in the coming years McKinney’s population will double in size.
“You can’t wait until you’ve expanded to that size to start worrying about building these extra facilities,” McKinney Superintendent Rick McDaniel said to the Dallas Morning News. “When I look into the future, these are things that we’re going to need, and I have to plan ahead.”
But McKinney is far from alone in the state in terms of building these extravagant high school football stadiums. Allen Independent School District, which is just down the street from McKinney, approved and built a $60 million stadium that at the time was billed the most expensive high school stadium in the world. The 18,000-seat Eagle Stadium, which had some early construction issues, is now in its fourth year of existence.
In the Houston-area, Katy recently approved the construction of its second high school football stadium. When voters approved the construction in 2014, the price tag for the 12,000-seat stadium was $58 million. But it due to rising construction cost it was revealed last month that $4.5 million more will be needed to finish construction for the stadium that is set to open in the fall of 2017. The interesting thing there is voters originally voted down a plan for a $69 million stadium because of concerns about cost and rising taxes.
But this arms race is likely to continue. McKinney is justifying the expense because it will be a multi-use facility with an attached events center that will serve three local high schools. In addition to football, the stadium will also be able to host soccer games, band competitions as well as banquets and reunions.
Still, Zimbalist says there is no way any these stadiums will be able to economically justify the expense.
“From an economics standpoint these stadiums do not pay off,” Zimbalist said to Prep2Prep. “You are talking about playing somewhere before five and eight games a year in the stadiums and then you might have a few extra events, concerts and other things. On the outside you maybe use the stadium 10, 15, maybe 20 days a year. I would also imagine you would have graduation parties and things like that, too, but that doesn’t generate any revenue.
“Once you spend $62 million building the stadium you are then going to have to spend money keeping it up and maintaining it. That’s going to cost easily hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, if not more. You don’t generate anywhere near the revenue to make that pay off.”
Zimbalist also makes the point that little new money will be generated as result of these new stadiums because are simply pulling from the residents currently in the community. That means fans who will spend money to attend games will likely not spend money doing other types of entertainment they might normally do in the community.
“So there is really no significant amounts of new money coming to the area because of the football stadium,” Zimbalist said. “It doesn’t matter that they spend $20 at the local football games because that means that is $20 they won’t spend at other entertainment venues in the community.”
But in state like Texas where football is king, it doesn’t seem to matter. There is a saying that everything is bigger in Texas. That, however, doesn’t mean it’s better.
“It certainly doesn’t pay off economically to build these. What these are are temples of culture,” Zimbalist said. “Insofar as there is any justification for them at all it’s because it allows people to indulge in their obsession with competitive high school football.”
