$60 million high school stadium in Texas closing

It’s not uncommon for high schools in Texas to spend a lot on their football programs. Anyone that has seen the show Friday Night Lights or has been in any part of Texas, particularly in the West Central region, knows that high school football is akin to church for many Texans.

In 2012, the town of Allen, which sits about 25 miles north and east of Dallas, opened a brand new high school football stadium to the tune of $60 million in taxpayer money. The stadium, which is supposed to seat 18,000 on top of 72 acres of land, is the fifth largest stadium in Texas. It also proudly holds the title for the largest stadium dedicated to one school. The stadium drew the ire of plenty of people, residents and non-residents, for being a lavish expenditure in a time when schools and teachers across the U.S. have been dealing with demands of salary increase and appropriate study materials.

The stadium has had problems since it opened. Now, those problems, once brushed off as just normal wear and tear are forcing the stadium to close for the upcoming school year. A report by Julieta Chiquillo of the Dallas Morning News says that the foundation problems, which have caused significantly noticeable cracking, have been discovered by a third party to be “outside the acceptable margins for error.”

The problems have existed since the stadium opened in 2012, but the designers, PBK Architects, informed the school district that the cracks were just part of normal concrete shrinkage. As those problems grew worse, the district decided to do a little more research into the problem.

"Nelson Forensics described several structural weaknesses in the concourse level in an April 2 letter to the Allen ISD attorney.For example, in isolated areas, the space between stirrups — bent rods used to reinforce joists — was 1 inch larger than the building code allows, Nelson Forensics found.The firm identified areas in the stadium where the load demand on the structure exceeded accepted building standards by 10 to 20 percent. In isolated locations, that number was greater than 70 percent, according to the firm’s analysis."

In short, without proper support, a lot of people standing on the concourse would cause the ground to basically collapse. For a football stadium expected to sell out every Friday night for 5 months of the year, not counting the amount of non-football activities planned, that’s not a very good thing. Of note, in the article by Chiquillo, is the fact that residents and taxpayers of the city of Allen, TX will not be required to submit any additional payment for the repairs necessary to the stadium. The Allen Independent School district webpage confirms as much in a Q&A addressing the closure.

It is unknown as to when the stadium will open again, but as board President Louise Master put it, “we’re not going to put a Band-Aid on it.”