Texas high school football stadium that cost $60 million to reopen after repairs

By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – One of the most expensive U.S. high school football stadiums ever built is set to reopen this month after undergoing millions of dollars of repairs to fix structural problems that had made it unsafe, officials in the Dallas suburb of Allen said on Monday.

The Allen Eagle Stadium will be used for graduation ceremonies on Friday. The $60 million stadium, which opened in 2012, was closed in February 2014 after cracks were discovered in the concourse of the structure.

School officials were not immediately available to comment on the repairs, which the Dallas Morning News said cost more than $10 million and were largely picked up by the contactor and architectural firm that built it.

“We ended up with the stadium that we originally asked for,” Allen Independent School District Superintendent Lance Hindt told the paper. “We ended up not paying a penny for it.”

The cost of the 18,000-seat stadium that includes a $1.3 million scoreboard was financed as part of a voter-approved $119 million bond package.

In Allen, as in many parts of Texas, high school football games are some of the most important events on the calendar.

The Allen Eagles football team, one of the strongest in its division in the state, had been playing games in the neighboring suburb of Plano after the stadium was shut.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Lisa Lambert)