See High School Football Stadium That Will Cost $63 Million

MCKINNEY, TX -- It’s no secret that in Texas, high school football is king. Any doubt about the level of mania for the sport quickly dissipates by taking a look at McKinney, a town in North Texas, where voters have approved construction for what’s believed to be the nation’s most expensive school stadium costing just under $63 million.

Throughout Texas, entire communities empty out on weekends to watch young gladiators compete under the “Friday night lights” of stadiums. The facilities become more than mere sports venues, but social focal points for communities in towns throughout the Lone Star State.

Thirty miles north of Dallas in McKinney, the stadium advances the idea that everything is bigger in Texas. It’s not just a stadium, but will feature an adjacent events center as well.

District officials say the stadium is for more than just football, and will host soccer games and band competitions and potentially state playoff games, according to The Dallas Morning News.

The majority of voters agreed with the need to build the complex, with 63 percent of registered voters approving a $220 million bond package that includes $62.8 million to finance stadium construction.

The 12,000-seat stadium itself will cost $50.3 million from the bond proceeds, district officials said. Another $12.5 million will be used for infrastructure from proceeds from a previous bond vote in 2000.

Another fifth of the bond proceeds will go toward facility upgrades -- such items as HVAC replacements, electrical revamping, roof replacements and plumbing. Expansions of band halls at a pair of middle schools and a high school also will paid with bond proceeds.

But even at $62.8 million dedicated actual stadium construction, the amount exceeds the $60 million previously spent in Allen (another northern suburb of Dallas) for the 18,000-seat Eagle Stadium -- a price tag that raised some eyebrows, even in high-school-football-loving Texas.

The McKinney plan also is slightly more than the $62.5 million being spent in the Houston suburb of Katy for its own stadium scheduled to open next year. That price tag also raised eyebrows, even those found on football fans’ faces.

But the role high school football plays in the lives of Texans transcends mere sports into something more akin to religion mixed with civic engagement. To millions, it’s a way of life, just part of being Texan.

And that feeling -- that mix of fan motivation with price being no object in achieving -- is institutionalized: Starting this season, Fricso ISD athletic teams will start playing in a new facility dubbed The Star -- a $255.5 million joint venture among the Dallas Cowboys, the City of Frisco and Frisco ISD.

The new facility will enable high school athletes in Frisco -- an affluent city straddling Denton and Collin counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex -- to play their games indoors. The high school players will be the first in Texas to ever play their games indoors.

The role high school football plays in Texas came into greater focus nationally after H.G. Bissinger wrote his celebrated non-fiction book “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream,” in 1990. The book details the importance placed on football even amid the poverty and academic challenges in the Permian Basin setting of Odessa, Texas.

But in an interview, he once explained how the chosen setting for his treatise was hardly atypical, but something of a metaphor that could be applied throughout the expanse of Texas.

“Odessa is the setting for this book, but it could be anyplace in this vast land where, on a Friday night, a set of spindly stadium lights rises to the heavens to so powerfully, and so briefly, ignite the darkness,” Bissinger said.

Throughout the state, such costly illumination shows no signs of fading anytime soon.

>>> Artist's rendering of stadium via McKinney ISD website