The $62m question: does a high school really need a professional-style stadium?

The Guardian

2 days ago

When the television cameras pan around the US's newest sporting temple to show the cavernous stands, elegant brick exterior, VIP suites and massive video board, viewers might believe they are looking at a professional venue.
Yet the occupants of Phillip Beard Stadium, the Buford Wolves, are not a professional team or even a college one. They are high-schoolers. In the exorbitant world of high school football, Buford's $62m, 10,000-capacity arena is not the biggest or most expensive taxpayer-funded student stadium in the US. But it may be the most luxurious.
The Wolves host the Milton Eagles on Thursday in the stadium's first regular-season game, which will be broadcast nationally on ESPN. With 13 Georgia state championships from 2001 to 2021 and a long record of players progressing to college scholarships and, eventually, the NFL, Buford is a football powerhouse – and the new stadium is a loud statement of the school's desire to keep it that way.
If it feels like half of Buford is at the big game … they probably are. The Atlanta-area city has roughly 19,000 residents and the well-regarded high school (rebuilt in 2019 for $85m) has about 1,900 students. In 2010, another educational institution in the Atlanta region, Kennesaw State University, built a smart 10,200 capacity multi-use stadium for $16.5m. In the past 15 years, however, construction costs have soared, fan expectations have evolved, streaming and social media have changed how we consume sports and college athletes are now allowed to earn significant sums by monetising their personal brands. The trend is clear: newer, fancier, costlier.
Phillip Beard Stadium has the typical uncovered benches familiar to anyone who's seen Friday Night Lights. Yet it also boasts more than 1,500 premium seats, 15 suites, a 3,600 sq ft double-sided video board and a 10,500 sq ft event space with a trophy wall. Buford City manager Bryan Kerlin told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the stadium had been paid for by the city general funds and its funding 'had no impact on teacher salaries, classroom resources, or any educational funding'. Still, there may well be other parts of the city the money could have been diverted to.
Besides, blending spartan spaces for students and high-end facilities for corporate clients and rich alumni is increasingly common. It could make financial sense for schools aiming to maximise revenues and claw back some of the construction and operating costs, according to Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. 'The economics term is price differentiation,' he says. It's long been common in professional sports as teams adopt a strategy beloved of airlines, with their myriad fare classes and options: charging wildly different amounts for the same product based on variations in the customer experience.
As the masses in the cheap seats generate the noise, corporate boxes can deliver thousands of dollars in income per event, giant video screens appeal to advertisers, and perhaps former students who've been wined and dined in air-conditioned comfort and enjoyed a perfect view of the action will be inspired to make generous donations to the alma mater.
Upscale new arenas are also a way to entice fans off the couch in an era when it seems like almost every sporting contest, no matter how obscure, is streamed. 'Everyone knows their biggest competitor is being able to watch on TV,' Matheson says. Climate-controlled facilities mitigate against extreme weather, and with gargantuan video boards, televisions on concourses, myriad food and drink options and glitzy graphics on LED ribbon displays, fans can go to the stadium, experience the live atmosphere and still gaze at screens.
Northwestern University in Illinois is building a privately-funded new stadium guided by the principle of 'premium for everybody,' reports Front Office Sports. At a projected cost of $862m it will be the most expensive college stadium ever, yet with only 35,000 seats it will hold 12,000 fewer people than the venue it is replacing. The theory underpinning the design is that modern fans want a more intimate and luxurious experience, with changing tastes – and a changing climate – rendering even relatively recent venues obsolete.
In 2020 Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers quit their open-air 48,000-capacity ballpark, which opened in 1994, for a new 40,000-capacity building with a retractable roof. This season a minor league baseball team, the Salt Lake Bees, moved from Smith's Ballpark, which also opened in 1994, to a new home, hiking ticket prices and halving their seating capacity in the process. The concentration on high-end customers, of course, prices out fans who cannot afford to spend heavily on a night out at the game.
'In all, premium seating makes up one-sixth of seats at the new ballpark, whereas it contributed to just 3% of Smith's Ballpark's capacity,' the Salt Lake Tribune reported. 'The seats closest to the action aren't available for sale on a per-ticket basis; instead, those are field-level suites that must be reserved in their entirety.' Sports' growing focus on premium customers mirrors a shift in the American economy as a whole: this year a Moody's Analytics study found that the US economy is now deeply reliant on the richest households, with the top 10% of earners accounting for 50% of consumer spending, a sharp rise from recent decades.
Logically, better facilities should breed better players, with victories leading to bigger attendances, swelling civic pride, adding to the appeal of the fast-growing suburbs where large high school stadiums are often located and boosting the prospects of the kids who dream of reaching the NFL. The trickle-down effect from the professional and college ranks to high schools isn't only a matter of swankier facilities. It's also visible in the potential financial incentives.
College players have been permitted to make money from their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights since 2021. In June this year a former high school player filed a class-action lawsuit in California challenging restrictions on the ability of the state's high school student-athletes to profit from their NIL rights. It could pave the way for high school stars across the US to earn income and to transfer to other schools for sporting reasons. 'Corporations see a lot of untapped economic value in high school athletics,' Yaman Salahi, an attorney representing the player named in the suit, said in a statement to Front Office Sports, 'and we want to ensure that value is shared equitably with the athletes that create it.'
Like teenaged soccer starlets at professional clubs in other countries, 16- and 17-year-old American football players might one day be wealthy and famous, with a status to match the grandeur of their home stadiums. 'The difference here is that it's the local public school that's doing the development,' Matheson points out.
For now, stadiums as sizeable and expensive as Buford's remain rare outside Texas, the state that is the centre of the high school football infrastructure arms race. In 2017 the independent school district in the Houston-area suburb of Katy opened a $70m, 12,000-capacity stadium adjacent to its existing and still operational 9,800-seat venue.
According to the website TexasBob.com, more than a quarter of the 1,267 high school football stadiums in Texas can hold over 5,000 people, with eight seating at least 16,500. The combined capacity of 4.4 million is larger than the populations of 24 states. About a quarter have video scoreboards and 27 high school stadiums have opened in Texas since 2020. A $56m multi-purpose venue in the Houston-area city of La Porte is set to host its inaugural match this month.
Texas produces more NFL players than any other state, found a study by the data analysis firm Lineups, with Houston the leading city. On the other hand, Texas is ranked 34th for educational attainment by US News & World Report, is far below the national average for teacher pay and expenditures per student, and according to one study, this year Texas teachers expect to spend on average $1,550 of their own money on classroom supplies. Many would argue there are better things to spend money on than school sports.