Building new home traditions
The new Pfield will get a workout, eventually hosting four teams.
C.J. King took his usual place for Pflugerville High’s season-opening football game last week.
Seated high above the action, microphone in front of him, he proudly lent his voice to his alma mater, just as he has for the past 25 years.
“It’s the best seat in the house,” said King, the Panthers’ longtime announcer.
No doubt, but it’s changed a little. The game between Pflugerville and Bowie on Aug. 31 was the first at the Pfield, the new 10,134seat stadium that also serves Hendrickson and Connally and start- ing next fall will have the newly opened Weiss High School. The facility, part of a $287 million bond package approved by voters in 2014, cost about $25.8 million, according to school district officials.
The stadium’s capacity is more than 22 times the city’s population in 1968, five years after King graduated. Back then only 452 people lived in Pflugerville, according to the Texas Handbook, and King recalls that 44 boys attended Pflugerville High when he was there. In true Texas fashion, 40 of them played football, he said.
King played end for several of the famed Pflugerville teams that combined to win 55 games in a row from 1958 to 1962, a national record at the time.
“When we were playing football, the town closed up on Friday night and everybody came up here,” he said. “... We only had one set of bleachers on the home side, and it would probably only hold 250 people.”
From his new perch inside the Pfield’s 4,631-square-foot press box, King has an excellent view of his city. Subdivisions and apartment complexes dot the horizon, and the old Kuempel Stadium — named after King’s coach, Charles “Hub” Kuempel, and the site of filming for TV’s “Friday Night Lights” — sits empty across the street.
Lights, camera, action ...
Down at field level last week, Bowie and Pflugerville players warmed up, and the Pfightin’ Panther band filed in through the gate behind the stadium’s gargantuan 40-by-64-foot video board. Meanwhile, a handful of their peers prepared for a new kind of game-day tradition.
They were the video board’s operators.
“Basically it’s an exten- sion of what we’re doing in the classroom already,” said David Robb, an audio/ video production teacher at Pflugerville. “There’s a real connection there as far as the career skills that they’re earning by working a live production like this.”
Senior James Cooley is one of those students who sees his future in media or a technology field. During the game, he sat in the press box’s control room and operated the tricaster, a multicamera production system that controls which images appear on the screen.
A group of professional broadcasters from Round Rock assisted during the first quarter, but Robb’s students took over from there.
“This is my first football game I’m filming,” said Makayla Moore, a senior who operated an on-field camera. “It’s a good expe- rience for me to get to do because what if I want to do this when I get older? Now I know what to do early on before I get to college, and if I don’t like this, then I’ll know not to go to college for it.”
Hendrickson students took over the video board for the Hawks’ game against Smith- son Valley last Friday, and their Connally counterparts will be at the controls for the first time this week when the Cougars make their debut at the Pfield.
Adjusting to home
Not everything went according to plan during the Pfield’s debut. Playing before 2,828 fans, Pfluger- ville fell into a 44-point hole in a lopsided loss to Bowie, and Hendrickson saw a three- point lead evaporate in the final seconds against Smith- son Valley.
The new stadium presented some challenges for the teams on the field, such as the student section butting up against the home team’s bench.
“I’m going to have to go on a diet because it is really tight on the sideline and it’s loud,” said Hendrickson coach Chip Killian, whose team’s game drew 3,335 fans. “It’s almost impossible to simulate that type of environment.”
That game-day environment, he added, qualifies as “so much better than what we had on our campuses.”
When plans for the Pfield were rolled out, detractors argued that the Pflugerville school district already had stadiums for each of its three schools. Some grumbled about having to leave their school’s boundaries to attend home games.
“I’m going to miss the H, to be honest,” Hendrickson defensive back Tobias Harris said before the start of the season, referring to the school’s moniker for Hawk Stadium.
District officials have said a centralized stadium will be more cost-effective, espe- cially with the addition of Weiss. Now administrators hope that with time and the embracing of new traditions, the Pfield will become hallowed ground.
“We want to prove to the Pflugerville community that the investment they made in this facility is going to be worth their money and worth their time,” said Todd Raymond, the district’s athletic director.
Perhaps the best way to do that is by fielding win- ning football teams, and Connally can be the first home school to pick up a victory when the Cougars face Del Valle at the Pfield on Friday night.
“We can say that we were the first ones to win there,” Connally senior linebacker Rashon Sheppard said. “I would like us to go unde- feated there. It feels like we’re starting over with a new field, new stands, just a new experience.”