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Lot of oil money in TX to be able to fund those HS to make sure they have the best of the best. Do the boosters spend the same on the schools to make sure the schools have the best teachers and the best equipment for the kids or does it only go to the sports teams?Here's one for you. We have two public high schools in Weslaco. Our city is about 45,000 population. Both teams use the same stadium for football. It's an $8 million dollar plant, so why not?
There are about 14,000 seats in the stadium, plus there's several hundred VIP accommodations. The going rate for seats is $35 for a season pass to the cheap seats. The first tier of special seats runs double that figure. Then there's the additional seats that sell out at $140 for a season. They are sold out long before the schedule comes out. Then there's at least another 2,000 road tickets that each school gets to collect on for each road game which are also sold out. That goes at the rate of $35 each also.
In the end, the total take for the ten games, home and away, is nearly $700,000. That does not include the shirts, caps, and all kinds of team stuff sold down here, as well as the advertising at the stadium, which from what I heard brings in over $150,000 a year.
In Texas, high school football is big business. That's why we have a huge $1 million scoreboard, which shows replays just like the NFL. It's the largest high school scoreboard in the nation, unless a bigger one has been built since. Ours is 36' x 66', and rivals those in major pro sports.
Now, that's one team's income. There's a second team, and they share the stadium, so that's split expenses.
Both teams have their own practice fields which would put a lot of Division III college team stadiums to shame, except they only have seating for about 3 or 4,000 people. They play Junior High games there, and they sell out too.
Some of the road games are over 200 miles away, so they are overnight trips. There are as many as 25 buses loaded with fans going to games on the road, and motels/hotels in some fairly large areas are full because of it. Teams want those road visitors because they pump a lot of money into the local economies if it's an over night trip.
It's so much different down here than up north.