In Texas, where everything is bigger, high school football is the biggest. Friday Night Lights was based here for a reason. There's no sport consistently bigger wherever you go.
The latest proof of that comes from Waxahachie, a town with a population of 32,000 about an hour south of Dallas. See, Waxahachie is installing a new video board for its stadium that will cost half a million dollars, and it obviously brought backlash.
HIGH SCHOOL. in a town with 32k people. https://t.co/MCvuabLld5
— El Flaco (@bomani_jones) June 13, 2016
@texashsfootball how about using this money for academics which schools are for.
— Matthew Permenter (@CharlesMattP) June 13, 2016
But this is nothing new for Texas or for the sport.
Waxahachie wanted this
The school board approved this and the residents themselves appear to have little to no problems with spending half a million to make the stadium experience marginally better. As members of the board pointed out, having a video board is beneficial during graduation and provides practical experience for journalism students who run it during games. And they did have electronic issues with it last year. But let's be real: this is mostly about football.
Waxahachie is coached by former NFL quarterback Jon Kitna and plays exciting, high-scoring football. They only missed the playoffs last year on a coin flip. Lumpkins Stadium, built in 1972 but renovated in 2011, holds nearly 10,000 and usually fills out a large portion of that.
This is becoming the new normal for Texas
McKinney, a suburb of Dallas, recently approved a $62.8 million stadium, and they bragged about the cost because it narrowly topped Allen's $62.5 million stadium built in 2012. Allen's stadium has made news because despite its cost, it had to be closed a year after construction to fix cracking concrete that made it unsafe. (It reopened last year after $10 million more in repairs, although that was paid by the construction company and architecture firm.) Poorer districts can't keep up, of course, but it's not just Dallas -- wealthy suburbs around Houston are also guilty of $63 million stadiums. This is all part of what the Dallas Morning News called an "arms race" for extravagant high school football stadiums around the state.
It's more than stadiums or video boards, too. As SB Nation's recruiting expert Bud Elliott mentioned to me, there are some high schools in Texas with indoor practice facilities that rival those at Ohio State or Florida State. This is a picture of a high school practice facility, after all.
.@AlabamaFTBL goes through its 1st #CottonBowl practice in Texas #RollTide pic.twitter.com/q4C88tkVW2
— Alabama Football (@AlabamaFTBL) December 26, 2015
Texas really, genuinely loves its high school football. Small towns shut down on Friday nights and stadiums turn into community hubs for an entire town. I've seen it first hand covering high school football games around Dallas throughout college. There's no doubt that the obsession with the sport can become unhealthy, especially at the highest levels. Fudging grades so athletes can stay eligible has long been a problem. Students can't be recruited by other high schools and aren't supposed to move school districts merely to play at a better program, but boosters can even work together with parents to find them new jobs, giving them a justified reason to move into new school districts. Of course, this disproportionately helps families who have money.
It doesn't have to be this way, but it probably will be
School districts pour so much money into high school football (and boys' basketball), even though teacher is one of the most underpaid professions in the world and Texas' education system ranks bottom-10 in the country. High school sports are incredibly important, make no mistake. They teach all sorts of great lessons, help propel the top athletes towards scholarships and generally provide a rallying point for communities. Those are all excellent things, but they can be done without turning high school football into a multi-million dollar industry.
The money that funds high school sports isn't coming from the sports, either. A 2011 Dallas Morning News study found that high school sports are rarely profitable, with only three of 30 local districts recording a net profit over a five-year period. If high school football was self-sufficient, it would be easier to defend the extreme amounts of money that pour into it. But it's not.
That's not to say Waxahachie's video board or McKinney's current stadium don't need to be replaced. As Texas Monthly pointed out, McKinney has an entirely inefficient 341 parking spaces and was opened more than 50 years ago. But nobody is making McKinney spend $62 million on athletics instead of academics. Nobody is making Waxahachie spend $500,000 on a video board when their budget for it was actually half that. From the Waxahachie Daily Light:
Because each student carries anywhere between $5,000 to $5,200 in regards to state-sourced revenues, WISD had roughly $250,000 extra in expenses to spend on the new scoreboards. The other half of the payment for the scoreboard bill will come from re-purposed funds gained throughout the school year.
But it doesn't seem like anything will change, because the adults in charge don't want anything to change. They love high school football. Maybe too much.