Another Texas town is preparing to join the ranks of Lone Star communities with pricey football stadiums. The Prosper (Texas) Independent School District has unveiled the design for a $48 million, 12,000-capacity stadium and natatorium.
The school system, about 30 miles north of Dallas in Collin County, says the facility is scheduled to open in August 2019, the same year that Prosper High School becomes a 6A school—the classification for the state's largest schools.
The stadium will be situated west of the high school. The facility also is intended to serve as home for the district's future high schools. The second high school in the Prosper district is scheduled to open in 2020.
The district points out that although the facility is scheduled to cost $48 million, the price tag is significantly smaller than stadiums other Texas districts have built.
"We have designed a facility that will meet the needs of [the district] for many years to come while engineering it in a way that comes in at price tag $15 million to $20 million less expensive than recent similar projects in the metroplex and across the state," the district says on its web site.
The costs of the stadiums being built in the McKinney and Katy districts are at least $70 million.
The community has been waiting many years for a new stadium. Voters approved a $710 million bond proposal in 2007, and plans called for the stadium to be built around 2010. However, the economic recession of 2008 put a snag in those plans, and Prosper officials devoted its capital resources to adding classroom space to keep up with enrollment growth—the district has been doubling its enrollment every five years and now has about 11,000 students.
A pause in school construction gives the district an opportunity to move forward with the stadium.
"Since we are not opening any new schools this year due to the uncertainty of public school funding, we have a window to insert these facilities that are needed and long overdue but do not carry any significant staffing costs as do schools," the district says. "We have stretched the use of our existing stadium as far as possible given our growth."
The architect for the stadium is Huckabee.
Video from Huckabee: A simulation of plans for the new sports facility in the Prosper district:
