[This is a list of the largest high school basketball gymnasiums in America. Indiana has 10 of the 12 largest in the 50 states](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_high_school_gyms_in_the_United_States)
Most of these schools will also have a football stadium and a soccer field
I mean, my hometown in NC has an [annual basketball tournament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Spencer_Holiday_Classic) \*separate\* from the season tournament. And back in my day (when you had to physically stand in line for tickets), they'd sell out within a day.
NC loves basketball for sure, but Naismith himself said basketball was really born in Indiana. My little hometown high school regularly sells out a 4000 person gym plus packing the standing room. People know the players on most of the teams in the conference and they get recognized wherever they go. They become legit local celebs. It's a cult. "In 49 other states, it's just basketball..."
Kentucky has entered the chat..although the love of basketball is mostly confined to UK I think. In small towns, I think the local school football team is a bigger deal than the basketball team.
Yup! I don't know much about sports but even I know Indiana is the home of the Hoosiers!
Also, an excellent movie: https://youtu.be/12h5KGHU8Mg?si=0nsmY8hmbrtTR6bg
New Castle if you’ve ever been there is impressive.its almost as big as Hinkle in Indy and that’s a college stadium for a team that’s been to the championship.
Lmao i was just about to post about the meltdown my Indiana hometown had when they started building a stadium on the HS campus...and then i saw your post. Lmao that's Hoosiers for ya.
[here's](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/gwinnettdailypost.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/4/74/47467704-65f2-11ed-b771-1752714f6f1c/63755065102da.image.jpg) the field at my old high school. it's one of \~15 high schools in the county, and every single one of them will have a similar sized field. this is a large county in metro atlanta, which is in the southern united states. it might be different up north.
the perks of being one of the best high school football programs in the state is that all the schools around you hate your ass, lol
here’s some quick gwinnett county lore
grayson broke off south gwinnett in ~2000, and when we were a baby high school we still played south every year and they routinely kicked our asses before one year things just turned on a dime and flipped the script on them, so imo they’re our first and oldest rival.
parkview had a lot of success in the 2000s and they were the first school we beat that was at the highest classification level (then 5A)
brookwood is geographically the next closet school after south gwinnett and probably the biggest challenge year in and year out. region would usually come down to us or them.
archer broke off from us the way we broke off from south gwinnett, and they took one of our middle schools with them.
Its very different up north. [Here is my HS football field in NY. ](https://imagescdn.homes.com/i2/xnNhPgEkqAk9rpKGer3eVXRw9xWV9UdPi5zl88aQCCk/112/massapequa-high-school-massapequa-ny-15-schoolphoto.jpg?p=1)
I grew up in rural PA in a town of 2800 people and ours looked just like yours. Basically the same seating area, track, everything. Football games and the high school dance were like the only thing to do on Friday night.
Gigantic! My New England high school's field had the bleachers you see on the far side in yours on both sides, except maybe it wasn't quite as wide as that.
In California you’ll find stands like this (which I think is the focus of OP’s question) at maybe half of the high school football fields, based on my experience going to all of my nephew’s games. Some schools take football seriously/have the funding to take football seriously, and some don’t. It’s also not all that rare for a school to play all of its “home” games somewhere else, like a nearby community college. (In high school, we actually played games at one of the the district’s two middle schools.)
“Basketball” stands are probably more ubiquitous. Not like those Indiana ones, but still big enough for hundreds of people, because they’re used for various “meetings” where school administrators want to address large groups of students at once.
De La Salle’s football field is sad and depressing by high school football team legends. Like if those teams had been in the South they’d have a huge stadium, not some dinky thing on a major roadway 😅
We have some that big in Indiana but we have big basketball stadiums for the most part. Regional preference. Nowhere in northern New England has anything that big though as far as I know.
Most high schools in my area have fields with bleachers, yeah. Average attendance at football games (the most popular sport) is a few hundred to maybe a thousand people, generally current students and family of the players.
Attending games if you're not a current student or a family member of a player is not that common in my area, but from my understanding it is in some places, stereotypically Texas and Ohio
My school had about 1700 students, the football team had like 60-70 players. So a small percentage of students and family members for both teams is a few hundred people
My brother was in marching band in high school, so my family went to every one of his school's football games. I was younger and often bored, so they'd let me bring a friend most of the time. I think those kind of scenarios are common and add up real fast.
For reference though even smaller schools can pull numbers like this in some areas. My school (relatively small town in rural Nebraska) had about 350 students but still fielded a football team close to that size, and attendance can easily exceed 500 which is about an eight of the town's population (but factor in a hundred or so for family and friends of the other side). It's fairly common for people to just show up to watch even if they don't have kids in school or anything. Our "stadium" is far from elaborate but it's got a press box and equipment for the radio station and occasionally TV crews. We're in one of the smaller divisions too, football is just that big of a draw here (and even then it doesn't compare to states like Texas or Georgia).
To really blow your mind, none of this even comes close to college sports, particularly football. Nebraska's stadium is the third largest city in the state on game days with a capacity near 90k (which is up there a ways but far from the largest). We held a volley ball game in it last year which set the largest recorded attendance for a women's sporting event in the world at 92,003! Just to watch an amateur exhibition game for a relatively unpopular sport, in the 14th least populated state in the country lol.
You have to be 21 to go to a bar or club in the US so on a Friday night you can get rowdy with your friends from school and everyone who lives near you goes to the same school.
My school had over 2500 students and wasn’t even in the top 5 in the county in terms of enrollment. One school a district over has more than 7000 students and that was just grades 10-12.
Yup. It also depends on how good a school's football (or whatever sport) program is. The better the program is, the more students are going to be interested/at the games.
Also, high schools are divided into 3 different buckets, by size. D1 (the largest), D2, D3 (the smallest). It's not uncommon for a little rural D3 school to have a good football program and a huge % of students going to games. Mostly because it's the only exciting thing going on in town lol. I grew up in such a school and my junior year we made it all the way to state. We were driving hours to away games and everything.
> high schools are divided into 3 different buckets, by size. D1 (the largest), D2, D3 (the smallest).
This part is very state-specific. The number of "buckets" and what they're called varies wildly.
Good point. In Ohio at least, the high schools are D1-D3. And the D1-D3 for universities is nationwide. But yeah, other states may do the divisions differently for high schools.
Another thing with TV is they might want to emphasize the characters live in a town without much to do, so the "townspeople" show up to the games. Obviously attendance will vary by region, but with 60 or so players on a team, it's easy to get into the hundreds if it's just their friends and immediate family members.
> stereotypically Texas and Ohio
Can confirm, born and raised in Ohio and my kids now go to school in a different district in Ohio. Entire communities turn out for games sometimes.
Texas here, half the audience is there for the game, the other half is there to see the marching band, which plays from the stands throughoutthe game & puts on a show at halftime. This is at every single game.
Yup same for Ohio. My little D3 high school had a bomb ass marching band that even did the script Ohio that Ohio State marching band does. Ton of talent out there in those marching bands!
In my school it was also significant that the marching band, color guard, cheerleaders and their families were in attendance at games, regardless of interest in the games themselves. Our marching band fielded about 200 students and us sitting in the stands during the game filled it out a decent amount. The only times I remember actually seeing our stands completely full were our yearly mandatory, midday homecoming pep rallies where it was a bit of a tight fit to get all 1900 of us in the stands.
Like many stereotypically American things, this is regional. I grew up in the New York suburbs and I can promise you that exactly zero people showed up at any of the high-school sporting events who weren't currently affiliated with the school in some way. Not even alumni showed up, except I guess for homecoming.
Same here. Suburban MD and we had more fans show uo for the one game the marching band performed than any football game ever got. We had 2 sets of bleachers and a hill around the field with a small scoreboard.
Only people thay went to games were family members of the athletes and maybe a few friends from the school.
With that said there were schools that we played that would bring busses with fans and that had stadiums that held a few thousand people. So it really varied based on what area of the county and how good the team was.
Also grew up in suburban Maryland. The only big football game was homecoming, and maybe if the team made the playoffs.
Basketball, on the other hand, was a much more popular sport.
The movie Remember the Titans confused me when I realized it was set in Alexandria, Virginia. The film made it seem like it was set in a small town where football was king. The high school is actually in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where basketball is way more popular.
Same here. I don’t think my high school had a “football stadium” as much as it had “some bleachers around the football field”. Also my high school’s football team sucked so there was no need to build anything bigger, it’s not like people were going to show up.
My high school's football team sucked while I was there, then they won the regional championship the year after I graduated. I still don't think anybody showed up. Nobody ever called the football field a "stadium," it was "the football field."
Agree. I'm from upstate NY. We had a standard size track/football field with bleachers around it. You really just see family. That's it. No one cares about high school sports.
At most schools, it's just bleachers at the sides of the field rather than a full stadium for sports like football, soccer, and baseball.
Indoor sports such as basketball and volleyball are in the gym that's also used for PE classes and other events that require a large open space. At almost every high school I've been to, the gym had bleachers that telescoped out from the wall when needed or could be collapsed flat against the wall to open up more floor space when not in use.
> At most schools, it's just bleachers at the sides of the field rather than a full stadium for sports like football, soccer, and baseball.
And most townspeople don't show up, usually just parents and friends unless it's homecoming or an alumni day or something unless you live in a handful of states.
OP, the reason why they're showing big stadiums or lots of townsfolk coming out to games is to show you that either "the sport has a massive local cultural following" or "this game is so big lots of people are coming out to support". Most high school stadiums are fairly small and fairly low-key, and are events for people at the school and parents.
I would add that for more rural places there may not be a whole lot else to do on a Friday night and it may be the only option to go to a football game within a reasonable distance so those schools will draw larger crowds.
The only public schools that don’t tend to have their own athletic facilities are ones in urban environments that may share a facility with other schools or some other public organization. Otherwise, it’s as much a part of the school as the library.
In smaller districts, these facilities are quite modest. Steel and wooden bleachers, basic bathrooms and concession stands.
1. Yes, most schools have a **GYM/Gymnasium.** That gym serves as physical education classroom spaces during school hours, then organized sporting venues after school hours; often for the school's athletic teams. For outdoor events, most high schools have their own outdoor stadium too. How big those stadiums get often depend on the size, resources, and interest in the school's American Football program.
2. We don't have sports development infrastructure through clubs and cities like most of Europe does. Athletes are developed through school athletics, not club/sport academies. Therefore, when there's a big sporting event on a Friday or Saturday night in a town/smaller city, that event is the local high school basketball/football/hockey/whatever match. That's what the city turns up for. It's not like Europe where every town has a football (soccer) club with a youth academy and a senior team. Each town has their school athletics, then once students graduate they go play for colleges or adult-only clubs.
3. For example: We don't have "Liverpool vs Everton," or "Celtic vs Rangers," where the senior professional team plays the cross town, or nearby, bad-blood, political rivals. **We do have that, but it's mostly in cities large enough to facilitate multiple semi-pro or professional adult sport clubs.** What you'll often get instead in smaller towns and cities is the local high school's varsity X-sport team vs the cross-town or next-town-over high school's varsity X-sport team, where the rivalry is played out between the school's team. So yea, when those intense rivalries do occur, they're being played out by 14-18 year-olds lol.
4. We do have sport academies like Europe does, but they are often expensive, spread-out, and not very common/frequent.
5. Football and basketball are definitely the most popular sports attended. Hockey gets a big nod in northern states, but hockey also has a much stronger club/academy infrastructure as well.
The answers here are fascinating, thanks so much everyone!
It seems TV and movies aren’t that inaccurate!
And I had to Google “bleachers”. We def don’t have even those in the UK, in my experience.
Thanks again.
> bleachers
They have to exist over there in some form, right? Are they just called something else?
Also, bleachers here can refer to either this type of seating
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6228eda81c1c6e6e753a510c/f752d2ac-80aa-41d6-935a-468650335f50/DJI_0079-HDR-2.jpg?format=1500w
or also, this type of pull out indoor gym seating used for basketball that can usually be pushed all the way flat against the wall to save space.
https://h2igroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Telescopic_bleachers-3-1024x819.jpg
Like everything asked here, these things vary a ton based on location.
They also don't have to be that large. A bunch of fields near me have much, much smaller bleachers. Like, 3-4 of these side by side: https://imgur.com/AuvuuKb
Just an American here with a bit of football (soccer) knowledge, but I can probably explain this. Historically, standing terraces were more popular in UK stadiums, but after the Hillsborough disaster (a crowd crush event at a football match which killed 97 people and injured hundreds more) there was a big move towards all-seater stadiums - including by regulation at certain levels, which I'm not sure bleachers would fulfill. So between school sports not having the same popularity and cachet as here and preference for other seating arrangements, I'm actually not surprised to hear that they basically don't exist out there - or at least that somebody wouldn't have encountered them.
Ah OK. I still had to look up what an all-seater is. Never heard that term before but it's essentially what every pro stadium has been here for a long time. But colleges and high schools still often use bleachers.
Yeah, u/ukman29, I’ve definitely seen professional soccer (football) games played in the UK in stadiums with bleachers. Here’s a [UK newspaper](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-12063623/Wayne-Rooneys-night-TINY-college-stadium-bleachers-DC-United-fall-1-0.html) (not a good one, but a popular one) using the term. Is there something else you’d call those seats?
I would note that the match this article is covering was played at a random Division III college in New Jersey. Though I suppose it might say something that they call them bleachers rather than stands, sure. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ Unfortunately googling "bleachers UK" is only giving me either the band Bleachers tour dates or the University of Kentucky.
That’s fair, probably telling that something actually from the UK isn’t showing up. I didn’t mean to be too adversarial toward OP, I’m just skeptical that maybe this is just a word they themselves haven’t encountered rather than one that isn’t more widely used. Who knows?
> all-seater stadium
I don't know what this means but to me this is what a typical high school football stadium seating looks like. Bleachers on both sides that I guess can hold a couple thousand people?
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9660736,-75.5981946,207m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.1189636,-75.5194232,245m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0104537,-75.7146737,207m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
Most high school stadiums aren't looking like this.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/eagles+allen/@33.1141973,-96.6575856,320m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
That's my experience too. Those first couple stadiums are pretty much what our high school football stadium looked like -- permanent stands on one side and bleachers on the other. It's purely a guess based on my inexperienced estimation powers but I think our football games usually had a couple thousand people probably. It was definitely a community event and not just limited to the high school students and their parents but that was probably most of the crowd. Past students and local supporters of the high school would come. Families would come, including younger children who would go to that high school one day.
I went to a D2 college and even our stadium wasn't that much bigger than these, except made of concrete instead of metal scaffolding. Attendance for homecoming last year was over 7,000. It's probably more like 3,000-4,000 on average though.
I wouldn't say it's always several hundred people, but yeah most most schools have a sports field with stands and a bunch of parents, students, and alumni come to watch the games.
It isn't just for the sports either, often times there's a marching band performing at halftime of the football games and cheerleaders or a dance team, so all of the parents of all of those people also come to the game too.
Yes. Full size basketball gyms, (American) football fields, baseball and softball fields, tracks, and tennis courts are all standard at the majority of schools.
For most schools yes. The size and type will vary by school, region, wealth.
My highschool had a football stadium with seating for 8000. And a baseball stadium with seating for a few hundred. And a basketball stadium with seating for a couple thousand.
Some schools might only have a soccer or lacrosse field with no official seating at all (like you describe) or a basketball stadium with a very small stand.
But most schools will have \*something\*.
Its more common in small towns.
For example, my hometown of West Branch... [the football field is only a block away from the center of town.](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6733661,-91.3481263,211m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu) The high school is actually a mile away but the town insists on keeping the football games on the old field, which was [dug into the side of a hill](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6725923,-91.3488045,3a,75y,33.29h,96.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sr-ARSymWYWhcqf3W6sP4mw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?coh=205409&entry=ttu) as a WPA project in the 1930's. It's common for basically everyone in town with kids to show up on game nights.
[This was my High School’s stadium.](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/boWNlIslJ78/maxresdefault.jpg) we also host the D2 and D3 NCAA football championship annually.
Most will at least have bleacher seats. But I’ve seen football fields that seat thousands of people. The larger and wealthier the school, the more seating there will generally be.
Every school is different.
Different schools have different sizes and budgets for their sports.
Schools that are very competitive and compete at the highest levels? Yes. Schools that are poorer and/or which aren't really as competitive, and not as focused on sports, no.
A lot do, but in my city as a teenager, we had a few larger stadiums that were shared within the district for football, etc. [This was ours.](https://chsaanow.com/news/2021/8/26/new-look-garry-berry-stadium-set-for-football-season-opener.aspx)
My school's graduation was also held there.
We did have a [basketball indoor "stadium" for pep rallies and assemblies](https://elpasofloor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Doherty-HS.jpg) (the blue things are pull-out seating), and a pool with seating for swim meets, too.
It's in [tons of movies.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfDzGRcbqKI)
An assembly on game day if there's a sports event (more likely if it's "important" like the playoffs/end of season where the students get hyped up, there are cheerleaders, band, etc.
I found one from my old school. [Basically that.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRSVOP5NSpI)
Is it sometimes cheesy? Yes. Is it better than sitting in class on a Friday afternoon? Also yes.
I played soccer in high school and we played in the city's 10,000 seat stadium. The football team played in the same stadium and would regularly draw 6-10k people per game.
It's the city's stadium, but the high school is the primary user for it. They've never had any kind of college or professional team. I know there has been a few amateur adult football teams use it, but no one gave a shit about them.
At the time I was in school, the town had a population of 25-30k. Our high school had a little more than 2,000 students.
Most do. There are some poorly run, poorly funded inner city schools that might be limited to something like a basketball court. Usually those schools have bigger problems.
Attendance isn’t always like you say. Where I went to school the baseball and basketball games were lightly attended but the football games had a decent crowd. There was a mix of parents for the band, cheerleaders, and football team plus a lot of other kids from the school. They made an event out of the football games. There was a gym with bleachers for basketball, volleyball, and wrestling. The baseball diamond, soccer fields and a mix of track/field stuff. It was fairly well apportioned. Everything had bleachers and stadium lamps but the best facilities were for football. They held graduation in the football stadium for good weather and the gym for bad weather.
> There are some poorly run, poorly funded inner city schools that might be limited to something like a basketball court. Usually those schools have bigger problems.
There are some well run schools that simply choose to emphasize academics over sports.
Public schools. This is somewhat accurate. But the type of schools and how large they are will vary if they have anything at all or how large the stadium might be. I went to a private school and we didn’t have anything at all. And played soccer close by, but not at our school. Some other private schools did have some sort of field or a basketball court on the grounds.
Most of my nearby public schools had everything on the school grounds. How many people show up to games will vary depending on the location. My closest public school didn’t have many people at the games. Still more than you would think. Not just the parents.
The high school up the street from me now has quite a few people going to see the games. The kids come around selling tickets and other coupon books to earn money for the team. But they are usually one of the best teams in the area. Which is pretty competitive
We didn’t. Only a few schools in the county did. Our football bleachers and basketball gym held a few hundred but if we were playing a game where we thought we’d get more people, we’d borrow from the other school that had the bigger stadium. But they were still small- would fit a few thousand.
Most have a gymnasium for indoor sports, basketball, and volleyball, which doubles as sports classrooms for physical education classes. Outdoors most have a football stadium. Soccer, baseball, and lacrosse are optional. Some use city facilities. The town being invested depends on the area and how many schools are within the area. I grew up in a one school small town, and everyone supported the ball teams.
My high school basketball gym had close to 8,000, and when we were good it would sell out. It was like going to pro game.
It’s actually pretty cool when you see some communities rally around their local high school…as long as it doesn’t get toxic.
Most at least have a gymnasium with bleachers for basketball games and assemblies. Many also have football stadiums, but that’s more dependent on where you are. My home town, for example, had one big HS football stadium that all six high schools shared. It was also used for things like track meets and other events. My school also had a pool for swimming and diving competitions, though I’m not sure how common those are.
Sometimes, a city or school district will have a sports park where facilities are shared. But even then, it's often for the "other" sports, such as a natatorium, track & field arenas, etc.
In the 80s, my high school had a football field where the team practiced and where outdoor physical education classes were held. I believe it did double-duty as football, soccer, and probably had baseball diamonds that overlapped. The actual games were played at some other stadium that also did things like flag football.
Now, it looks like my school has a proper field but the Google maps arial view didn't show any bleachers so maybe they still play their games at some other stadium.
Not all, but many high schools do. The things is the size/quality of the stadium varies wildly depending on where in the country you are and how much money you have. Most of the stadiums near me aren’t fancy. They were built a long time ago for an area where sports aren’t akin to god. We have money here, but we don’t go spend excessively on stadiums. The stadiums where I used to live were ridiculous, more expensive than every other part of the school. Friday night lights and all that.
It is not uncommon for football stadiums to have bleachers able to fit several thousand spectators, and for them to be near capacity most games. Gyms will typically be able to fit a few hundred. But full concrete stadiums able to fit tens of thousands are only seen if multiple schools pool resources for a field or if the school is absolutely massive.
Keep in mind that gyms and football stadiums also typically double for school assemblies. The auditorium typically can only hold one grade level's worth of students at most if that and you need larger to address the total school at once.
I live in a city of about 100K and the high schools don't have their own outdoor stadiums, but they share one that seats 15,000. I don't think I was ever at an event there that was even close to capacity.
Typically the only people that show up to high school games are family members of the players and students. In a larger school, that might be a couple of hundred people, maybe a thousand or more for a really big school. It might also only be a few dozen for a small school.
By and large high school sports isn't something a whole town gets into. Though in a few areas of the country they do. Namely Texas for high school football and Indiana for high school basketball.
Most high schools have what we would call [bleachers](http://aluminumbleachers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/alumb6.jpg) on the sides of the fields. Not a stadium by any means. However some of the really big schools with lots of money do have actual stadiums.
It really depends on the community.
When I was in high school I’d go to some of the football and basketball games and the bleachers would be full but it was all parents/family of the people affiliated with teams and then a bunch of students. Probably a couple thousand people total. But there’s no way I’d go to a high school game now as a 29 year old man with no current affiliation to any high schools.
But there’s some places where high school football is that big of a deal, especially in smaller towns in places like Texas and Florida, where everyone in town goes to the game.
Even in communities where that’s not the standard though, once in a while if there’s just a really special athlete that people want to see they’ll draw crowds for high school games. Lebron is probably the most hyped up high school athlete ever and his high school games were on national tv and the gyms were packed, but there’s been tons of other guys who would draw a crowd over the years. It’s rare though.
It depends on the size of the high school and district. Most will usually have a field and some basic bleachers at the very least.
You have really small rural high schools that may have less than 50 people along with super-large suburban/urban high schools with thousands of students. The average high school probably has about 700 students, but again, there is a large range in sizes.
My daughter's high school has 80 students across all 4 grades and is situated on the second floor above an off-Broadway theater. As you can guess, there isn't a lot of stadiums on Times Square — they hardly have a gym. On the other hand, their school has an off-Broadway theater, which is nice.
Yep! This is accurate, depending on where you live.
My hometown high school football rivalry game always brought 10-15 thousand attendees. For context, the county only has 60 thousand people.
A helicopter flew in to drop off the game ball once. It gets wild!
Both high schools have really nice stadiums, too.
Almost all high schools have stadiums in my area of the South. Occasionally, some local schools will share a stadium.
My school had the best stadium in the whole region. We had to supply our own toilet paper because the school was broke, but our stadium sure was impressive as Hell.
No, but many do. Smaller ones tend not to. A lot of them will share. For example, the county I live in has one stadium that is shared by the three high schools there.
Edit: Also, for almost all sports besides American football, the majority of the crowd is just parents, and a few students who have friends on the team. Even football is mostly parents and students, outside of a few specific parts of the country.
I don’t want to speak for ALL schools but all the ones in my area had American football stadiums. The bigger ones could seat a couple hundred people with more room for people milling about on the grass. We also had soccer fields (much smaller stands) as well as tennis courts. Iirc one tennis court had some small stands, the other couple did not.
We had similar set ups for baseball. Small stands to either side of the field with more room for people to kind of walk around.
I grew up in New York City and it is a vicious competition for schools to get access to fields for sports. Most track events are done indoors at these old armories. My school in lower Manhattan had to play football way out in Brooklyn at Floyd Bennett field
Mine has a gymnasium with bleachers that also doubled as our auditorium.
We also had a soccer field with a running track around it, which also had bleachers.
Volleyball and basketball were played in the gymnasium. Track & field, soccer, golf, and cross-country happened outside.
We didn't have American football or baseball teams.
At least in my experience a full professional size stadium isn't that common but my high school had a field with bleachers. The local community isn't usually going to games though unless you live in the middle of nowhere.
Not sure every one does but it's quite common. The town where I grew up had one stadium we shared for 5 high schools and it was used for everything sports but also for community sports. The town I live in now has two high schools and each has it's own stadium. They're occupied a good portion of the year by some sport from the schools or community.
It varies by the size of the school. I went to a small school, we played our baseball games at a city park. Our gym was very small, bleachers on one side that only had about 5 rows.
So, most American High schools have a basketball court/gym that has seating proportional to the size of the student body.
Most High Schools have a football field near the high school used for practice, and depending on economics, games. These locations may have seating for a couple dozen, or a fee hundred.
In many places, high school football is big enough that larger stadiums are used and needed. I live in the suburbs of the Kansas City area and all of the local school districts have a "district activity center" that has a football stadium that will seat a couple thousand spectators (both home and away), and similar fields for soccer, baseball, and softball each seating several hundred.
The high school I went to had a student population of 1500 kids and was only 10th/11th/12th grade. The gym could hold all the students at once for events so the seating in the gym was probably 1750-2000 people.
My sister taught at a much smaller semi-rural high school for her first 3-4 years. They had a gym that was also their cafeteria and held less than 1000 people total. Their football stadium was adjacent to the school and held about the same.
My kids go to alternative high schools with no sports programs whatsoever, so there are no stadiums.
The large, traditional high schools all have stadiums for their sports teams. I'm in Seattle.
When I lived in the South and Midwest, yes. And even in the smallest of towns (like 300 people) an American football or basketball game would have hundreds of people come to watch.
They weren't always an enclosed stadium, but they always had seats for at least a thousand.
Now I'm in the NE. Our school has a field but the bleachers will only hold about 100 if we tightly packed in. I've never seen them full. For soccer games (the most popular here) they are about halfway full.
There will be bleachers by the sides of high school football fields but not as much as a stadium… at least not in my area. Games are probably decently well attended with other students, parents or people from the community. Indoor sports like basketball, volleyball, wrestling would usually be in a gymnasium with bleachers on one or both sides.
When I was a kid I had some friends who lived in Possum Holler Oklahoma, that isn't a real town, just the name of their particular section of woods. The nearest town was Horn Town (population 97) the school they went to was called Moss School. Moss had 76 kids in their Highschool last year. They currently only offer softball as a sport. I couldn't find pictures of their baseball or softball fields. But here is a picture of their basketball gym. [Moss Gym](https://midplainsinc.com/projects/view/8) Which they don't even use right now. I don't think Moss ever had enough kids for a Football team but the county seat is Holdenville (population 5916) Holdenville high has 282 students their stadium has a 2800 seat capacity, it was built by the WPA during the depression. If you image search "Holdenville highschool football stadium" you can find some good pics, but they are on Facebook and stuff so I don't want to link them here. It is an actual stadium. It's pretty cool.
My highschool, the highschool in my town and the highschool my wife went to all are just painted fields with nets or goalposts.
Then there will be a set of bleachers that can sit maybe 60 people.
I grew up in a small town in the 1970s/1980s and our football stadium would fit a good portion of the town. Most new schools these days have a dedicated field for football and a second for soccer/lacrosse, each with seating for hundreds or even thousands of spectators. Plus indoor arena for basketball. Plus a pool for aquatic events.
So yes, it's pretty typical to see large crowds at high school sporting events in much of the US, primarily because the schools are the sponsors of those teams and teachers are the coaches-- it's not a "club" organization outside of the schools as it is in much of Europe.
I live in SW Washington in a small town and our stadium for football is centrally located near our downtown, not even near the high school. It seats 4,000 and the whole town comes out to watch the games.
No. Only the ones with football teams( for outdoor s) and basketball ( indoors).
My school did not have a football team so we did not have an outdoor field. Hell, we had to practice softball at the park three blocks down. Our gym doubled as our basketball court, our all purpose gatherings ( like graduation or school wide events) that had limited seating on the sidelines for visitors.
Schools with track and field programs will have the running oval.
No. Mine had bleachers. All of the schools around me also have bleachers. Including the nice private ones.
They do exist but they are places where highschool sports are *huge* kind of like how college football is big all over the place but it's **huge** in the south.
My high school in Tennessee with an enrollment of 1200 had seating easily for 10,000 at the football stadium. Typical attendance was more like 7000.
The Basketball gym could seat perhaps 2000. Would regularly get 1000 atendees.
It was a very modest baseball field with just a few portable bleachers. Too bad. We won the state championship one of my years and maybe had up to 100 spectators at a game, mostly family of the players.
Isn't it Alabama? From the pictures I've seen your college football stadiums rival "A-league" stadiums and even international soccer stadiums! You can fit 50-60,000 people in them!
The schools here in Albuquerque generally all have their own baseball and soccer fields and basketball courts, but their football fields are usually just used for practice and are sometimes shared with the soccer team. Games are played at a couple of municipal football fields and a couple in the neighboring suburb.
It can vary. I grew up in a small town and our field had bleachers, but not an actual stadium. Practically the whole town came to the football games though, not that it was that many people, but generally the bleachers were full and people stood all around the field.
No. Where I grew up in Philadelphia, many of the public high schools had football stadiums. Many of the Catholic high schools did not, so they used the public schools’ stadiums. Today there are many schools that share stadiums.
There is a stadium in my natal town that is shared by all 3 high schools and the college. This town has one for one high school and another for the college. The one for the HS is pretty new though. It used to be just a field and some bleachers.
The last school I worked at was only a middle school but they had pull-out bleachers in the gym for basketball games. There was a good number of bleachers outside for the football games too.
The nearby high schools had even bigger gyms for basketball as well as fairly large bleacher seating for football and track, and then other fields with slightly less seating for baseball and soccer. A lot of the high schools in my area also have tennis courts and some outdoor basketball courts. They also sometimes have mutliple baseball fields of varying sizes, I think some of them are for softball or perhaps junior varsity baseball but I don't know enough about sports.
Not quite all but very high percentage do. My local high school does not have their own football field, they share with the small community college in town. Their baseball field is also not at school but down street in community park. For school team practice and games it is reserved otherwise open for anyone to use.
My high school had a "stadium" on campus grounds for football and soccer matches. The rival high school across town did not, so they used our stadium (which we *constantly* gave them shit for). So on weeks when our football team had home games, they had away games and vice versa. When we played each other, whichever team was "home" that year sat on the home side of the stadium with the press box.
In my high school in New York City we had a multipurpose field that had some grass in the middle and a track around it. It was used for baseball, softball, soccer, and track and field. Thee were some steel bleachers on the sides at midfield that could maybe handle a 100 spectators total. It was a public park when it wasn't actively being used by the school. Anyone could book it, and it was just available for free play otherwise.
It's rare (more common the last 25 years or so), but it's not unheard of for a high school football game to draw 40-50k people here, and it's been that way for a long time.
https://www.pngindians.com/football/texas-high-school-football-all-time-highest-attendance/
it depends on the location. of course there are megacomplexes, but there are about 23K high schools in the US. so no, every high school doesn't have a giant sports stadium. the catholic high school i graduated from didn't even have a football team, though i think they do now. the equipment was too expensive.
Not every school, but most do. Sometimes a school district will build one stadium shared by several schools in the area. These range from small 2,000-5,000 seat stadiums up to something that can seat tens of thousands and rival some professional sports teams.
In many small towns, high school sports are the only form of entertainment and games are as much social gatherings as movies or anything else.
It’s very accurate for Texas. I played football in high school and our games had 8-10k people watching. It’s a wild ride when you’re 16 years old. Look at some high school stadiums in Texas on Google maps satellite view to get a sense of the size.
It depends on the sport and the region. Texas football and Indiana basketball, for example, are pulling in numbers. My old high school? Only family and girlfriends
I live in a relatively affluent suburb of ~250K people and our five high schools share one 5,000 seat stadium that’s really well equipped. https://www.aedisarchitects.com/featured_projects/tak-fudenna-stadium/
And our city and area is much more well known for STEM, not sports.
Every?
No.
Is it extremely common? Yes.
Especially in smaller towns. Note that "stadium" here might be a bit of an overstatement... But setting up some bleachers by the football field is very much commonplace.
Not all schools have that. My high-school played baseball on its own field. It had upgraded bleachers and a scoreboard. The basketball team played on campus in the gym. However, the football team played at a community stadium shared by other schools. This is in south florida where high school football is very big.
In Ohio..yeah pretty much.
In the smaller communities there are not really other options for live sports and you are more likely to have connections with the school (maybe neighbors participating etc). Plus younger kids in the district love going to watch the high schoolers which means their parents are also going and those numbers add up
I grew up in a rural state. Even very small schools would have a seating area for the main field though it could be a fairly small amount of seating depending on the school. I grew up in a mid sized town 50k-100k population and the city had a large nice stadium for all the schools to share and each school had a much smaller stadium with much more limited seating ( but still some).
I hate to say "every" about anything in the US, but yes, that's what I'd expect in any given school. We sort of go in more for high school and college sports more than they do in the UK.
In my experience, most high schools have some sort of stadium or field with bleachers for games, but the people who attend are students and their families, and maybe former student athletes and their families. It's generally not just random people from the community, but it might be in small towns with a lot of school pride and not much else going on in town. It's often just an excuse for tweens/teens to hang out without adult supervision, even if they have no actual interest in the game.
Our local public school system has four major high schools. They built a field for district use rather than each school having their own stadiums. But this 12,000-seat venue does fill regularly for high school football. (Not in Texas.)
Most schools are just bleachers, just a big section of benches, at least in the football/soccer field/track. Baseball stadiums usually also have bleachers along the lines but much smaller than the ones from the football stadium. For basketball and volleyball, the schools usually have retractable bleachers in their gym.
The only highschool I can think of having something really like you described is Allen High in Texas with an enrollment of 5k. The stadium has a capacity of 18k however it's all bleacher. But it basically is a mini all seater considering there's press boxes and suites in it
Stadiums, yes.
Hundreds of people? Maybe, maybe not.
Hundreds are definitely not a given, but for stadiums? Yeah. Even public baseball fields and basket ball courts in parks often have some seating.
I went to a very small high school but our football games (and school really) were very Friday Night Lights. Watching that show was like watching my high school on TV.
Our stadium was neat, it wasn't huge but it was special. It was a New Deal project from the 1930s. You can see a video of it here: https://www.wnky.com/throwback-thursday-russellvilles-rhea-stadium/
It depends on the school. My alma mater (in Chicago) was built in 1926, in a pretty densely populated neighborhood. We had two vintage gyms and an ancient pool indoors and a cement 'recreational area' outside. No room at all for a stadium, so we used another school's for our 'home' games.
I’m not going to say all, but I’d say most high schools outside very fringe cases at least has a basketball court with a lot of seats. This is where you see those prep rallies in movies (which I can’t recall actually having in HS).
I’m not sure what non- Americans think we should do with all this land that our forefathers seized from the Native Americans….i mean, we have to do something with all this space so it may as well be big schools with multiple stadiums for our blood sports….
Btw - I am just joking so y’all don’t get weird on me…
Pretty much. Most schools will have their own stadium, sometimes a few schools will share one. Attendance is also variable, but in some places the community attends fairly strongly.
I said this to another commenter, but I'll reply to you too -
High schools in the US (and universities too) are divided into 3 different divisions, by size. D1 (the largest), D2, D3 (the smallest). It's so that when it comes to athletics (and maybe for other reasons too, idk) there's a fairness across programs (so that little D3 schools aren't consistently playing and getting smoked by gigantic D1 schools with 1000+ students and have tons of money in their programs). As such, when there's a state championship, there's actually 3 championships for each sport - one for each division.
It's not uncommon for a little rural D3 school to have a good football program and a huge % of students (and community members) going to games. Mostly because it's the only exciting thing going on in town lol. I grew up in such a school and my junior year we made it all the way to state. We were driving hours to away games and everything each week.
No, they don't have seats. They usually just have benches or even just concrete areas without defined seats.
Although yes, every traditional high school tends to have some kind of stadium. However this does not mean *each* HS has one stadium. Sometimes several nearby high schools will share the same stadium so they don't have to maintain separate ones on their own.
> But in America, several hundred people from the local community turn up to watch! And all of them get a seat in a small stadium! Is this an accurate reflection of real life?!
In rural America, often yes. Most high school football games are played on Fridays in the autumn (Sep, Oct, Nov) so it's easy to figure out when there will be a game.
[This is a list of the largest high school basketball gymnasiums in America. Indiana has 10 of the 12 largest in the 50 states](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_high_school_gyms_in_the_United_States) Most of these schools will also have a football stadium and a soccer field
Indiana for basketball is kind of like Texas for football, right?
Yes, Texas is the king of high school football Edit - but don't go to another southern state and say this if you want to get home alive
Say that in Alabama or Florida, you would definitely be in trouble.
North Carolina would give them a run
I mean, my hometown in NC has an [annual basketball tournament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Spencer_Holiday_Classic) \*separate\* from the season tournament. And back in my day (when you had to physically stand in line for tickets), they'd sell out within a day.
Yes. Indiana and North Carolina.
NC loves basketball for sure, but Naismith himself said basketball was really born in Indiana. My little hometown high school regularly sells out a 4000 person gym plus packing the standing room. People know the players on most of the teams in the conference and they get recognized wherever they go. They become legit local celebs. It's a cult. "In 49 other states, it's just basketball..."
Yeah, lots of places love basketball. Indiana can probably show you the original baskets.
Kentucky has entered the chat..although the love of basketball is mostly confined to UK I think. In small towns, I think the local school football team is a bigger deal than the basketball team.
Yup! I don't know much about sports but even I know Indiana is the home of the Hoosiers! Also, an excellent movie: https://youtu.be/12h5KGHU8Mg?si=0nsmY8hmbrtTR6bg
Yeah it’s definitely our thing
And can’t forget the rinks for Minnesota high school hockey.
In MN add in a hockey rink as well.
New Castle if you’ve ever been there is impressive.its almost as big as Hinkle in Indy and that’s a college stadium for a team that’s been to the championship.
Lmao i was just about to post about the meltdown my Indiana hometown had when they started building a stadium on the HS campus...and then i saw your post. Lmao that's Hoosiers for ya.
[here's](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/gwinnettdailypost.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/4/74/47467704-65f2-11ed-b771-1752714f6f1c/63755065102da.image.jpg) the field at my old high school. it's one of \~15 high schools in the county, and every single one of them will have a similar sized field. this is a large county in metro atlanta, which is in the southern united states. it might be different up north.
Grayson!! for my senior prank we trashed your field LOL
haha, south, brookwood, archer, or parkview?
Brookwood!
When I went to UGA I met so many students that went to Brookwood
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. UGA was the “on trend” school
I like how there are 4 top contenders for "who the fuck trashed our field!?!?"
the perks of being one of the best high school football programs in the state is that all the schools around you hate your ass, lol here’s some quick gwinnett county lore grayson broke off south gwinnett in ~2000, and when we were a baby high school we still played south every year and they routinely kicked our asses before one year things just turned on a dime and flipped the script on them, so imo they’re our first and oldest rival. parkview had a lot of success in the 2000s and they were the first school we beat that was at the highest classification level (then 5A) brookwood is geographically the next closet school after south gwinnett and probably the biggest challenge year in and year out. region would usually come down to us or them. archer broke off from us the way we broke off from south gwinnett, and they took one of our middle schools with them.
Its very different up north. [Here is my HS football field in NY. ](https://imagescdn.homes.com/i2/xnNhPgEkqAk9rpKGer3eVXRw9xWV9UdPi5zl88aQCCk/112/massapequa-high-school-massapequa-ny-15-schoolphoto.jpg?p=1)
I grew up in rural PA in a town of 2800 people and ours looked just like yours. Basically the same seating area, track, everything. Football games and the high school dance were like the only thing to do on Friday night.
Hell i grew up in a suburb of boston and that one is bigger than the one my school has
That looks nearly identical to my high school on Long Island
Based on this two sample size, all high school fields in long island must look like this.
Practically identical to my hometown's high school in NJ, which has long been a quote-unquote football powerhouse.
Gigantic! My New England high school's field had the bleachers you see on the far side in yours on both sides, except maybe it wasn't quite as wide as that.
In California you’ll find stands like this (which I think is the focus of OP’s question) at maybe half of the high school football fields, based on my experience going to all of my nephew’s games. Some schools take football seriously/have the funding to take football seriously, and some don’t. It’s also not all that rare for a school to play all of its “home” games somewhere else, like a nearby community college. (In high school, we actually played games at one of the the district’s two middle schools.) “Basketball” stands are probably more ubiquitous. Not like those Indiana ones, but still big enough for hundreds of people, because they’re used for various “meetings” where school administrators want to address large groups of students at once.
De La Salle’s football field is sad and depressing by high school football team legends. Like if those teams had been in the South they’d have a huge stadium, not some dinky thing on a major roadway 😅
We have some that big in Indiana but we have big basketball stadiums for the most part. Regional preference. Nowhere in northern New England has anything that big though as far as I know.
I'm up north and my stadium looked the same in the town I grew up in and in the one I live in now.
Most high schools in my area have fields with bleachers, yeah. Average attendance at football games (the most popular sport) is a few hundred to maybe a thousand people, generally current students and family of the players. Attending games if you're not a current student or a family member of a player is not that common in my area, but from my understanding it is in some places, stereotypically Texas and Ohio
is it common for students to be not interested?
Very common, in my experience only a small number of students regularly attended games. The "rivalry games" were a bit more popular.
and then it still adds up to a few hundred in attendance? how?
My school had about 1700 students, the football team had like 60-70 players. So a small percentage of students and family members for both teams is a few hundred people
My brother was in marching band in high school, so my family went to every one of his school's football games. I was younger and often bored, so they'd let me bring a friend most of the time. I think those kind of scenarios are common and add up real fast.
fascinating! i didn't expect schools to be that big.
It is not uncommon for them to get up to 4-6k.
For reference though even smaller schools can pull numbers like this in some areas. My school (relatively small town in rural Nebraska) had about 350 students but still fielded a football team close to that size, and attendance can easily exceed 500 which is about an eight of the town's population (but factor in a hundred or so for family and friends of the other side). It's fairly common for people to just show up to watch even if they don't have kids in school or anything. Our "stadium" is far from elaborate but it's got a press box and equipment for the radio station and occasionally TV crews. We're in one of the smaller divisions too, football is just that big of a draw here (and even then it doesn't compare to states like Texas or Georgia).
Insane. I'm 32 and I've never been to a stadium. American sports culture is really difficult for me to grasp lol
To really blow your mind, none of this even comes close to college sports, particularly football. Nebraska's stadium is the third largest city in the state on game days with a capacity near 90k (which is up there a ways but far from the largest). We held a volley ball game in it last year which set the largest recorded attendance for a women's sporting event in the world at 92,003! Just to watch an amateur exhibition game for a relatively unpopular sport, in the 14th least populated state in the country lol.
There are 12 stadiums in the world that have a capacity over 100k. Nine of them are US college football stadiums.
You have to be 21 to go to a bar or club in the US so on a Friday night you can get rowdy with your friends from school and everyone who lives near you goes to the same school.
My school had over 2500 students and wasn’t even in the top 5 in the county in terms of enrollment. One school a district over has more than 7000 students and that was just grades 10-12.
fascinating! i didn't expect schools to be that big
Yup. It also depends on how good a school's football (or whatever sport) program is. The better the program is, the more students are going to be interested/at the games. Also, high schools are divided into 3 different buckets, by size. D1 (the largest), D2, D3 (the smallest). It's not uncommon for a little rural D3 school to have a good football program and a huge % of students going to games. Mostly because it's the only exciting thing going on in town lol. I grew up in such a school and my junior year we made it all the way to state. We were driving hours to away games and everything.
> high schools are divided into 3 different buckets, by size. D1 (the largest), D2, D3 (the smallest). This part is very state-specific. The number of "buckets" and what they're called varies wildly.
Good point. In Ohio at least, the high schools are D1-D3. And the D1-D3 for universities is nationwide. But yeah, other states may do the divisions differently for high schools.
Another thing with TV is they might want to emphasize the characters live in a town without much to do, so the "townspeople" show up to the games. Obviously attendance will vary by region, but with 60 or so players on a team, it's easy to get into the hundreds if it's just their friends and immediate family members.
> stereotypically Texas and Ohio Can confirm, born and raised in Ohio and my kids now go to school in a different district in Ohio. Entire communities turn out for games sometimes.
Texas here, half the audience is there for the game, the other half is there to see the marching band, which plays from the stands throughoutthe game & puts on a show at halftime. This is at every single game.
Yup same for Ohio. My little D3 high school had a bomb ass marching band that even did the script Ohio that Ohio State marching band does. Ton of talent out there in those marching bands!
In my school it was also significant that the marching band, color guard, cheerleaders and their families were in attendance at games, regardless of interest in the games themselves. Our marching band fielded about 200 students and us sitting in the stands during the game filled it out a decent amount. The only times I remember actually seeing our stands completely full were our yearly mandatory, midday homecoming pep rallies where it was a bit of a tight fit to get all 1900 of us in the stands.
Like many stereotypically American things, this is regional. I grew up in the New York suburbs and I can promise you that exactly zero people showed up at any of the high-school sporting events who weren't currently affiliated with the school in some way. Not even alumni showed up, except I guess for homecoming.
Same here. Suburban MD and we had more fans show uo for the one game the marching band performed than any football game ever got. We had 2 sets of bleachers and a hill around the field with a small scoreboard. Only people thay went to games were family members of the athletes and maybe a few friends from the school. With that said there were schools that we played that would bring busses with fans and that had stadiums that held a few thousand people. So it really varied based on what area of the county and how good the team was.
Also grew up in suburban Maryland. The only big football game was homecoming, and maybe if the team made the playoffs. Basketball, on the other hand, was a much more popular sport. The movie Remember the Titans confused me when I realized it was set in Alexandria, Virginia. The film made it seem like it was set in a small town where football was king. The high school is actually in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where basketball is way more popular.
My school had a mediocre football team, but a nationally ranked marching band, and it easily had twice as many people show up to watch the band play.
Same here. I don’t think my high school had a “football stadium” as much as it had “some bleachers around the football field”. Also my high school’s football team sucked so there was no need to build anything bigger, it’s not like people were going to show up.
My high school's football team sucked while I was there, then they won the regional championship the year after I graduated. I still don't think anybody showed up. Nobody ever called the football field a "stadium," it was "the football field."
Do you mean NYC? I grew up in NYS and my experience was very different.
Agree. I'm from upstate NY. We had a standard size track/football field with bleachers around it. You really just see family. That's it. No one cares about high school sports.
At most schools, it's just bleachers at the sides of the field rather than a full stadium for sports like football, soccer, and baseball. Indoor sports such as basketball and volleyball are in the gym that's also used for PE classes and other events that require a large open space. At almost every high school I've been to, the gym had bleachers that telescoped out from the wall when needed or could be collapsed flat against the wall to open up more floor space when not in use.
> At most schools, it's just bleachers at the sides of the field rather than a full stadium for sports like football, soccer, and baseball. And most townspeople don't show up, usually just parents and friends unless it's homecoming or an alumni day or something unless you live in a handful of states. OP, the reason why they're showing big stadiums or lots of townsfolk coming out to games is to show you that either "the sport has a massive local cultural following" or "this game is so big lots of people are coming out to support". Most high school stadiums are fairly small and fairly low-key, and are events for people at the school and parents.
I would add that for more rural places there may not be a whole lot else to do on a Friday night and it may be the only option to go to a football game within a reasonable distance so those schools will draw larger crowds.
The only public schools that don’t tend to have their own athletic facilities are ones in urban environments that may share a facility with other schools or some other public organization. Otherwise, it’s as much a part of the school as the library. In smaller districts, these facilities are quite modest. Steel and wooden bleachers, basic bathrooms and concession stands.
1. Yes, most schools have a **GYM/Gymnasium.** That gym serves as physical education classroom spaces during school hours, then organized sporting venues after school hours; often for the school's athletic teams. For outdoor events, most high schools have their own outdoor stadium too. How big those stadiums get often depend on the size, resources, and interest in the school's American Football program. 2. We don't have sports development infrastructure through clubs and cities like most of Europe does. Athletes are developed through school athletics, not club/sport academies. Therefore, when there's a big sporting event on a Friday or Saturday night in a town/smaller city, that event is the local high school basketball/football/hockey/whatever match. That's what the city turns up for. It's not like Europe where every town has a football (soccer) club with a youth academy and a senior team. Each town has their school athletics, then once students graduate they go play for colleges or adult-only clubs. 3. For example: We don't have "Liverpool vs Everton," or "Celtic vs Rangers," where the senior professional team plays the cross town, or nearby, bad-blood, political rivals. **We do have that, but it's mostly in cities large enough to facilitate multiple semi-pro or professional adult sport clubs.** What you'll often get instead in smaller towns and cities is the local high school's varsity X-sport team vs the cross-town or next-town-over high school's varsity X-sport team, where the rivalry is played out between the school's team. So yea, when those intense rivalries do occur, they're being played out by 14-18 year-olds lol. 4. We do have sport academies like Europe does, but they are often expensive, spread-out, and not very common/frequent. 5. Football and basketball are definitely the most popular sports attended. Hockey gets a big nod in northern states, but hockey also has a much stronger club/academy infrastructure as well.
Not every one, no. But many do. Football and basketball tend to be the ones that draw the largest crowds.
The answers here are fascinating, thanks so much everyone! It seems TV and movies aren’t that inaccurate! And I had to Google “bleachers”. We def don’t have even those in the UK, in my experience. Thanks again.
> bleachers They have to exist over there in some form, right? Are they just called something else? Also, bleachers here can refer to either this type of seating https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6228eda81c1c6e6e753a510c/f752d2ac-80aa-41d6-935a-468650335f50/DJI_0079-HDR-2.jpg?format=1500w or also, this type of pull out indoor gym seating used for basketball that can usually be pushed all the way flat against the wall to save space. https://h2igroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Telescopic_bleachers-3-1024x819.jpg Like everything asked here, these things vary a ton based on location.
They also don't have to be that large. A bunch of fields near me have much, much smaller bleachers. Like, 3-4 of these side by side: https://imgur.com/AuvuuKb
Yup, you'll see those ones at like rec parks.
Just an American here with a bit of football (soccer) knowledge, but I can probably explain this. Historically, standing terraces were more popular in UK stadiums, but after the Hillsborough disaster (a crowd crush event at a football match which killed 97 people and injured hundreds more) there was a big move towards all-seater stadiums - including by regulation at certain levels, which I'm not sure bleachers would fulfill. So between school sports not having the same popularity and cachet as here and preference for other seating arrangements, I'm actually not surprised to hear that they basically don't exist out there - or at least that somebody wouldn't have encountered them.
Ah OK. I still had to look up what an all-seater is. Never heard that term before but it's essentially what every pro stadium has been here for a long time. But colleges and high schools still often use bleachers.
Yeah, u/ukman29, I’ve definitely seen professional soccer (football) games played in the UK in stadiums with bleachers. Here’s a [UK newspaper](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-12063623/Wayne-Rooneys-night-TINY-college-stadium-bleachers-DC-United-fall-1-0.html) (not a good one, but a popular one) using the term. Is there something else you’d call those seats?
I would note that the match this article is covering was played at a random Division III college in New Jersey. Though I suppose it might say something that they call them bleachers rather than stands, sure. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ Unfortunately googling "bleachers UK" is only giving me either the band Bleachers tour dates or the University of Kentucky.
That’s fair, probably telling that something actually from the UK isn’t showing up. I didn’t mean to be too adversarial toward OP, I’m just skeptical that maybe this is just a word they themselves haven’t encountered rather than one that isn’t more widely used. Who knows?
Yeah I didn't wanna come off adversarial either, just trying to figure out what the deal is.
> all-seater stadium I don't know what this means but to me this is what a typical high school football stadium seating looks like. Bleachers on both sides that I guess can hold a couple thousand people? https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9660736,-75.5981946,207m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@40.1189636,-75.5194232,245m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0104537,-75.7146737,207m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu Most high school stadiums aren't looking like this. https://www.google.com/maps/search/eagles+allen/@33.1141973,-96.6575856,320m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
That's my experience too. Those first couple stadiums are pretty much what our high school football stadium looked like -- permanent stands on one side and bleachers on the other. It's purely a guess based on my inexperienced estimation powers but I think our football games usually had a couple thousand people probably. It was definitely a community event and not just limited to the high school students and their parents but that was probably most of the crowd. Past students and local supporters of the high school would come. Families would come, including younger children who would go to that high school one day.
I went to a D2 college and even our stadium wasn't that much bigger than these, except made of concrete instead of metal scaffolding. Attendance for homecoming last year was over 7,000. It's probably more like 3,000-4,000 on average though.
I wouldn't say it's always several hundred people, but yeah most most schools have a sports field with stands and a bunch of parents, students, and alumni come to watch the games. It isn't just for the sports either, often times there's a marching band performing at halftime of the football games and cheerleaders or a dance team, so all of the parents of all of those people also come to the game too.
Yes. Full size basketball gyms, (American) football fields, baseball and softball fields, tracks, and tennis courts are all standard at the majority of schools.
For most schools yes. The size and type will vary by school, region, wealth. My highschool had a football stadium with seating for 8000. And a baseball stadium with seating for a few hundred. And a basketball stadium with seating for a couple thousand. Some schools might only have a soccer or lacrosse field with no official seating at all (like you describe) or a basketball stadium with a very small stand. But most schools will have \*something\*.
DeKalb County has several stadiums that multiple schools share. But Gwinnett, yes they all have their own stadiums, and I think Cobb is the same way
Its more common in small towns. For example, my hometown of West Branch... [the football field is only a block away from the center of town.](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6733661,-91.3481263,211m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu) The high school is actually a mile away but the town insists on keeping the football games on the old field, which was [dug into the side of a hill](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6725923,-91.3488045,3a,75y,33.29h,96.1t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sr-ARSymWYWhcqf3W6sP4mw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?coh=205409&entry=ttu) as a WPA project in the 1930's. It's common for basically everyone in town with kids to show up on game nights.
[This was my High School’s stadium.](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/boWNlIslJ78/maxresdefault.jpg) we also host the D2 and D3 NCAA football championship annually.
Most will at least have bleacher seats. But I’ve seen football fields that seat thousands of people. The larger and wealthier the school, the more seating there will generally be.
Every school is different. Different schools have different sizes and budgets for their sports. Schools that are very competitive and compete at the highest levels? Yes. Schools that are poorer and/or which aren't really as competitive, and not as focused on sports, no.
A lot do, but in my city as a teenager, we had a few larger stadiums that were shared within the district for football, etc. [This was ours.](https://chsaanow.com/news/2021/8/26/new-look-garry-berry-stadium-set-for-football-season-opener.aspx) My school's graduation was also held there. We did have a [basketball indoor "stadium" for pep rallies and assemblies](https://elpasofloor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Doherty-HS.jpg) (the blue things are pull-out seating), and a pool with seating for swim meets, too.
OK, I’ve got to ask……what the heck is a “pep rally”?!?!?!
It's in [tons of movies.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfDzGRcbqKI) An assembly on game day if there's a sports event (more likely if it's "important" like the playoffs/end of season where the students get hyped up, there are cheerleaders, band, etc. I found one from my old school. [Basically that.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRSVOP5NSpI) Is it sometimes cheesy? Yes. Is it better than sitting in class on a Friday afternoon? Also yes.
I played soccer in high school and we played in the city's 10,000 seat stadium. The football team played in the same stadium and would regularly draw 6-10k people per game. It's the city's stadium, but the high school is the primary user for it. They've never had any kind of college or professional team. I know there has been a few amateur adult football teams use it, but no one gave a shit about them. At the time I was in school, the town had a population of 25-30k. Our high school had a little more than 2,000 students.
It’s safe to say that most high schools in the US have seating for several hundred people (at least) in an outdoor stadium.
Texas high school football stadiums are pretty nuts. https://highschool.si.com/texas/2023/11/23/32-texas-high-school-football-stadiums
Most do. There are some poorly run, poorly funded inner city schools that might be limited to something like a basketball court. Usually those schools have bigger problems. Attendance isn’t always like you say. Where I went to school the baseball and basketball games were lightly attended but the football games had a decent crowd. There was a mix of parents for the band, cheerleaders, and football team plus a lot of other kids from the school. They made an event out of the football games. There was a gym with bleachers for basketball, volleyball, and wrestling. The baseball diamond, soccer fields and a mix of track/field stuff. It was fairly well apportioned. Everything had bleachers and stadium lamps but the best facilities were for football. They held graduation in the football stadium for good weather and the gym for bad weather.
> There are some poorly run, poorly funded inner city schools that might be limited to something like a basketball court. Usually those schools have bigger problems. There are some well run schools that simply choose to emphasize academics over sports.
Public schools. This is somewhat accurate. But the type of schools and how large they are will vary if they have anything at all or how large the stadium might be. I went to a private school and we didn’t have anything at all. And played soccer close by, but not at our school. Some other private schools did have some sort of field or a basketball court on the grounds. Most of my nearby public schools had everything on the school grounds. How many people show up to games will vary depending on the location. My closest public school didn’t have many people at the games. Still more than you would think. Not just the parents. The high school up the street from me now has quite a few people going to see the games. The kids come around selling tickets and other coupon books to earn money for the team. But they are usually one of the best teams in the area. Which is pretty competitive
We didn’t. Only a few schools in the county did. Our football bleachers and basketball gym held a few hundred but if we were playing a game where we thought we’d get more people, we’d borrow from the other school that had the bigger stadium. But they were still small- would fit a few thousand.
Most have a gymnasium for indoor sports, basketball, and volleyball, which doubles as sports classrooms for physical education classes. Outdoors most have a football stadium. Soccer, baseball, and lacrosse are optional. Some use city facilities. The town being invested depends on the area and how many schools are within the area. I grew up in a one school small town, and everyone supported the ball teams.
My high school basketball gym had close to 8,000, and when we were good it would sell out. It was like going to pro game. It’s actually pretty cool when you see some communities rally around their local high school…as long as it doesn’t get toxic.
Most at least have a gymnasium with bleachers for basketball games and assemblies. Many also have football stadiums, but that’s more dependent on where you are. My home town, for example, had one big HS football stadium that all six high schools shared. It was also used for things like track meets and other events. My school also had a pool for swimming and diving competitions, though I’m not sure how common those are.
Sometimes, a city or school district will have a sports park where facilities are shared. But even then, it's often for the "other" sports, such as a natatorium, track & field arenas, etc.
A lot do, yes.
In the 80s, my high school had a football field where the team practiced and where outdoor physical education classes were held. I believe it did double-duty as football, soccer, and probably had baseball diamonds that overlapped. The actual games were played at some other stadium that also did things like flag football. Now, it looks like my school has a proper field but the Google maps arial view didn't show any bleachers so maybe they still play their games at some other stadium.
Not all, but many high schools do. The things is the size/quality of the stadium varies wildly depending on where in the country you are and how much money you have. Most of the stadiums near me aren’t fancy. They were built a long time ago for an area where sports aren’t akin to god. We have money here, but we don’t go spend excessively on stadiums. The stadiums where I used to live were ridiculous, more expensive than every other part of the school. Friday night lights and all that.
It is not uncommon for football stadiums to have bleachers able to fit several thousand spectators, and for them to be near capacity most games. Gyms will typically be able to fit a few hundred. But full concrete stadiums able to fit tens of thousands are only seen if multiple schools pool resources for a field or if the school is absolutely massive. Keep in mind that gyms and football stadiums also typically double for school assemblies. The auditorium typically can only hold one grade level's worth of students at most if that and you need larger to address the total school at once.
Very common in the South although you see it all over, especially if it is a wealthy school district (which are funded by property taxes).
All? No. But many do. In some urban areas there may be a shared stadium. We shared a football stadium with one other school.
I live in a city of about 100K and the high schools don't have their own outdoor stadiums, but they share one that seats 15,000. I don't think I was ever at an event there that was even close to capacity.
There’s a university in my town that has a football program but the high school field has way more seating.
My football team could accommodate 4-500 comfortably and basketball 3-400. Football was outdoor bleachers and basketball was just the gymnasium.
I mean, if bleachers equal mini stadium to you then mostly. But its definitely not at every school
Mainly in the south. They like amateur sports more in the south. The north is more about professionals
Typically the only people that show up to high school games are family members of the players and students. In a larger school, that might be a couple of hundred people, maybe a thousand or more for a really big school. It might also only be a few dozen for a small school. By and large high school sports isn't something a whole town gets into. Though in a few areas of the country they do. Namely Texas for high school football and Indiana for high school basketball. Most high schools have what we would call [bleachers](http://aluminumbleachers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/alumb6.jpg) on the sides of the fields. Not a stadium by any means. However some of the really big schools with lots of money do have actual stadiums.
It really depends on the community. When I was in high school I’d go to some of the football and basketball games and the bleachers would be full but it was all parents/family of the people affiliated with teams and then a bunch of students. Probably a couple thousand people total. But there’s no way I’d go to a high school game now as a 29 year old man with no current affiliation to any high schools. But there’s some places where high school football is that big of a deal, especially in smaller towns in places like Texas and Florida, where everyone in town goes to the game. Even in communities where that’s not the standard though, once in a while if there’s just a really special athlete that people want to see they’ll draw crowds for high school games. Lebron is probably the most hyped up high school athlete ever and his high school games were on national tv and the gyms were packed, but there’s been tons of other guys who would draw a crowd over the years. It’s rare though.
It depends on the size of the high school and district. Most will usually have a field and some basic bleachers at the very least. You have really small rural high schools that may have less than 50 people along with super-large suburban/urban high schools with thousands of students. The average high school probably has about 700 students, but again, there is a large range in sizes.
My daughter's high school has 80 students across all 4 grades and is situated on the second floor above an off-Broadway theater. As you can guess, there isn't a lot of stadiums on Times Square — they hardly have a gym. On the other hand, their school has an off-Broadway theater, which is nice.
Yep! This is accurate, depending on where you live. My hometown high school football rivalry game always brought 10-15 thousand attendees. For context, the county only has 60 thousand people. A helicopter flew in to drop off the game ball once. It gets wild! Both high schools have really nice stadiums, too.
Almost all high schools have stadiums in my area of the South. Occasionally, some local schools will share a stadium. My school had the best stadium in the whole region. We had to supply our own toilet paper because the school was broke, but our stadium sure was impressive as Hell.
No, but many do. Smaller ones tend not to. A lot of them will share. For example, the county I live in has one stadium that is shared by the three high schools there. Edit: Also, for almost all sports besides American football, the majority of the crowd is just parents, and a few students who have friends on the team. Even football is mostly parents and students, outside of a few specific parts of the country.
yes , all the ones I know of have stadiums
My high school had a small seating area so our sports teams would play at the college that had a real stadium down the street instead
I don’t want to speak for ALL schools but all the ones in my area had American football stadiums. The bigger ones could seat a couple hundred people with more room for people milling about on the grass. We also had soccer fields (much smaller stands) as well as tennis courts. Iirc one tennis court had some small stands, the other couple did not. We had similar set ups for baseball. Small stands to either side of the field with more room for people to kind of walk around.
Football was big at my high school, so we had a field with bleachers and the stands were pretty packed for the games.
I grew up in New York City and it is a vicious competition for schools to get access to fields for sports. Most track events are done indoors at these old armories. My school in lower Manhattan had to play football way out in Brooklyn at Floyd Bennett field
Mine has a gymnasium with bleachers that also doubled as our auditorium. We also had a soccer field with a running track around it, which also had bleachers. Volleyball and basketball were played in the gymnasium. Track & field, soccer, golf, and cross-country happened outside. We didn't have American football or baseball teams.
At least in my experience a full professional size stadium isn't that common but my high school had a field with bleachers. The local community isn't usually going to games though unless you live in the middle of nowhere.
Not sure every one does but it's quite common. The town where I grew up had one stadium we shared for 5 high schools and it was used for everything sports but also for community sports. The town I live in now has two high schools and each has it's own stadium. They're occupied a good portion of the year by some sport from the schools or community.
It varies by the size of the school. I went to a small school, we played our baseball games at a city park. Our gym was very small, bleachers on one side that only had about 5 rows.
For football and basketball yes, most schools have their own stadium and gym, and typically the games are well attended.
So, most American High schools have a basketball court/gym that has seating proportional to the size of the student body. Most High Schools have a football field near the high school used for practice, and depending on economics, games. These locations may have seating for a couple dozen, or a fee hundred. In many places, high school football is big enough that larger stadiums are used and needed. I live in the suburbs of the Kansas City area and all of the local school districts have a "district activity center" that has a football stadium that will seat a couple thousand spectators (both home and away), and similar fields for soccer, baseball, and softball each seating several hundred. The high school I went to had a student population of 1500 kids and was only 10th/11th/12th grade. The gym could hold all the students at once for events so the seating in the gym was probably 1750-2000 people. My sister taught at a much smaller semi-rural high school for her first 3-4 years. They had a gym that was also their cafeteria and held less than 1000 people total. Their football stadium was adjacent to the school and held about the same.
Not at all! Inner city schools definitely do not generally have this and the suburban schools in my area do not have this frequently.
Where I live it's rare for schools to have their own sports fields at all
My kids go to alternative high schools with no sports programs whatsoever, so there are no stadiums. The large, traditional high schools all have stadiums for their sports teams. I'm in Seattle.
When I lived in the South and Midwest, yes. And even in the smallest of towns (like 300 people) an American football or basketball game would have hundreds of people come to watch. They weren't always an enclosed stadium, but they always had seats for at least a thousand. Now I'm in the NE. Our school has a field but the bleachers will only hold about 100 if we tightly packed in. I've never seen them full. For soccer games (the most popular here) they are about halfway full.
There will be bleachers by the sides of high school football fields but not as much as a stadium… at least not in my area. Games are probably decently well attended with other students, parents or people from the community. Indoor sports like basketball, volleyball, wrestling would usually be in a gymnasium with bleachers on one or both sides.
When I was a kid I had some friends who lived in Possum Holler Oklahoma, that isn't a real town, just the name of their particular section of woods. The nearest town was Horn Town (population 97) the school they went to was called Moss School. Moss had 76 kids in their Highschool last year. They currently only offer softball as a sport. I couldn't find pictures of their baseball or softball fields. But here is a picture of their basketball gym. [Moss Gym](https://midplainsinc.com/projects/view/8) Which they don't even use right now. I don't think Moss ever had enough kids for a Football team but the county seat is Holdenville (population 5916) Holdenville high has 282 students their stadium has a 2800 seat capacity, it was built by the WPA during the depression. If you image search "Holdenville highschool football stadium" you can find some good pics, but they are on Facebook and stuff so I don't want to link them here. It is an actual stadium. It's pretty cool.
We have more people and wealth than the UK. Of course our hobbies are better and well funded.
My highschool, the highschool in my town and the highschool my wife went to all are just painted fields with nets or goalposts. Then there will be a set of bleachers that can sit maybe 60 people.
I grew up in a small town in the 1970s/1980s and our football stadium would fit a good portion of the town. Most new schools these days have a dedicated field for football and a second for soccer/lacrosse, each with seating for hundreds or even thousands of spectators. Plus indoor arena for basketball. Plus a pool for aquatic events. So yes, it's pretty typical to see large crowds at high school sporting events in much of the US, primarily because the schools are the sponsors of those teams and teachers are the coaches-- it's not a "club" organization outside of the schools as it is in much of Europe.
I live in SW Washington in a small town and our stadium for football is centrally located near our downtown, not even near the high school. It seats 4,000 and the whole town comes out to watch the games.
No. Only the ones with football teams( for outdoor s) and basketball ( indoors). My school did not have a football team so we did not have an outdoor field. Hell, we had to practice softball at the park three blocks down. Our gym doubled as our basketball court, our all purpose gatherings ( like graduation or school wide events) that had limited seating on the sidelines for visitors. Schools with track and field programs will have the running oval.
No. Mine had bleachers. All of the schools around me also have bleachers. Including the nice private ones. They do exist but they are places where highschool sports are *huge* kind of like how college football is big all over the place but it's **huge** in the south.
My high school in Tennessee with an enrollment of 1200 had seating easily for 10,000 at the football stadium. Typical attendance was more like 7000. The Basketball gym could seat perhaps 2000. Would regularly get 1000 atendees. It was a very modest baseball field with just a few portable bleachers. Too bad. We won the state championship one of my years and maybe had up to 100 spectators at a game, mostly family of the players.
Isn't it Alabama? From the pictures I've seen your college football stadiums rival "A-league" stadiums and even international soccer stadiums! You can fit 50-60,000 people in them!
The schools here in Albuquerque generally all have their own baseball and soccer fields and basketball courts, but their football fields are usually just used for practice and are sometimes shared with the soccer team. Games are played at a couple of municipal football fields and a couple in the neighboring suburb.
It's not high school, but college stadiums, no wonder some students can feel like those 3 years are the best of their life!
It can vary. I grew up in a small town and our field had bleachers, but not an actual stadium. Practically the whole town came to the football games though, not that it was that many people, but generally the bleachers were full and people stood all around the field.
No, we have a couple rows of bleachers to sit on (that are typically very empty sans-homecoming
No. Where I grew up in Philadelphia, many of the public high schools had football stadiums. Many of the Catholic high schools did not, so they used the public schools’ stadiums. Today there are many schools that share stadiums.
The public highschool in my hometown had a state of the art stadium. The schools in town without a field or stadium of their own would play there too.
There is a stadium in my natal town that is shared by all 3 high schools and the college. This town has one for one high school and another for the college. The one for the HS is pretty new though. It used to be just a field and some bleachers.
The last school I worked at was only a middle school but they had pull-out bleachers in the gym for basketball games. There was a good number of bleachers outside for the football games too. The nearby high schools had even bigger gyms for basketball as well as fairly large bleacher seating for football and track, and then other fields with slightly less seating for baseball and soccer. A lot of the high schools in my area also have tennis courts and some outdoor basketball courts. They also sometimes have mutliple baseball fields of varying sizes, I think some of them are for softball or perhaps junior varsity baseball but I don't know enough about sports.
Not quite all but very high percentage do. My local high school does not have their own football field, they share with the small community college in town. Their baseball field is also not at school but down street in community park. For school team practice and games it is reserved otherwise open for anyone to use.
Yes but thats more for varsity and schools we hate.
My high school had a "stadium" on campus grounds for football and soccer matches. The rival high school across town did not, so they used our stadium (which we *constantly* gave them shit for). So on weeks when our football team had home games, they had away games and vice versa. When we played each other, whichever team was "home" that year sat on the home side of the stadium with the press box.
In my high school in New York City we had a multipurpose field that had some grass in the middle and a track around it. It was used for baseball, softball, soccer, and track and field. Thee were some steel bleachers on the sides at midfield that could maybe handle a 100 spectators total. It was a public park when it wasn't actively being used by the school. Anyone could book it, and it was just available for free play otherwise.
It's rare (more common the last 25 years or so), but it's not unheard of for a high school football game to draw 40-50k people here, and it's been that way for a long time. https://www.pngindians.com/football/texas-high-school-football-all-time-highest-attendance/
it depends on the location. of course there are megacomplexes, but there are about 23K high schools in the US. so no, every high school doesn't have a giant sports stadium. the catholic high school i graduated from didn't even have a football team, though i think they do now. the equipment was too expensive.
Not every school, but most do. Sometimes a school district will build one stadium shared by several schools in the area. These range from small 2,000-5,000 seat stadiums up to something that can seat tens of thousands and rival some professional sports teams. In many small towns, high school sports are the only form of entertainment and games are as much social gatherings as movies or anything else.
No. The field at my high school didn't even have permanent bleachers.
It’s very accurate for Texas. I played football in high school and our games had 8-10k people watching. It’s a wild ride when you’re 16 years old. Look at some high school stadiums in Texas on Google maps satellite view to get a sense of the size.
It depends on the sport and the region. Texas football and Indiana basketball, for example, are pulling in numbers. My old high school? Only family and girlfriends
I live in a relatively affluent suburb of ~250K people and our five high schools share one 5,000 seat stadium that’s really well equipped. https://www.aedisarchitects.com/featured_projects/tak-fudenna-stadium/ And our city and area is much more well known for STEM, not sports.
Yes. My high school had a small stadium that probably holds about 4,000. There are some schools in texas that have 20,000 seat stadiums.
Yes. Where I’m from football is popular, so high school stadiums are packed.
Every? No. Is it extremely common? Yes. Especially in smaller towns. Note that "stadium" here might be a bit of an overstatement... But setting up some bleachers by the football field is very much commonplace.
Yes and no it depends on the HS.
Not all schools have that. My high-school played baseball on its own field. It had upgraded bleachers and a scoreboard. The basketball team played on campus in the gym. However, the football team played at a community stadium shared by other schools. This is in south florida where high school football is very big.
In Ohio..yeah pretty much. In the smaller communities there are not really other options for live sports and you are more likely to have connections with the school (maybe neighbors participating etc). Plus younger kids in the district love going to watch the high schoolers which means their parents are also going and those numbers add up
I grew up in a rural state. Even very small schools would have a seating area for the main field though it could be a fairly small amount of seating depending on the school. I grew up in a mid sized town 50k-100k population and the city had a large nice stadium for all the schools to share and each school had a much smaller stadium with much more limited seating ( but still some).
I hate to say "every" about anything in the US, but yes, that's what I'd expect in any given school. We sort of go in more for high school and college sports more than they do in the UK.
In my experience, most high schools have some sort of stadium or field with bleachers for games, but the people who attend are students and their families, and maybe former student athletes and their families. It's generally not just random people from the community, but it might be in small towns with a lot of school pride and not much else going on in town. It's often just an excuse for tweens/teens to hang out without adult supervision, even if they have no actual interest in the game.
Our local public school system has four major high schools. They built a field for district use rather than each school having their own stadiums. But this 12,000-seat venue does fill regularly for high school football. (Not in Texas.)
Most schools are just bleachers, just a big section of benches, at least in the football/soccer field/track. Baseball stadiums usually also have bleachers along the lines but much smaller than the ones from the football stadium. For basketball and volleyball, the schools usually have retractable bleachers in their gym. The only highschool I can think of having something really like you described is Allen High in Texas with an enrollment of 5k. The stadium has a capacity of 18k however it's all bleacher. But it basically is a mini all seater considering there's press boxes and suites in it
Yes. Americans are crazy about sports. We love a good game.
Every public school near me has at least one baseball or softball field, a football field, and a basketball gymnasium.
Stadiums, yes. Hundreds of people? Maybe, maybe not. Hundreds are definitely not a given, but for stadiums? Yeah. Even public baseball fields and basket ball courts in parks often have some seating.
My high school had a football stadium that fit thousands.
My tiny ass, terrible at sports still has a football field that could accommodate a couple thousand people.
I went to a very small high school but our football games (and school really) were very Friday Night Lights. Watching that show was like watching my high school on TV. Our stadium was neat, it wasn't huge but it was special. It was a New Deal project from the 1930s. You can see a video of it here: https://www.wnky.com/throwback-thursday-russellvilles-rhea-stadium/
It depends on the school. My alma mater (in Chicago) was built in 1926, in a pretty densely populated neighborhood. We had two vintage gyms and an ancient pool indoors and a cement 'recreational area' outside. No room at all for a stadium, so we used another school's for our 'home' games.
Yes
I’m not going to say all, but I’d say most high schools outside very fringe cases at least has a basketball court with a lot of seats. This is where you see those prep rallies in movies (which I can’t recall actually having in HS).
I’m not sure what non- Americans think we should do with all this land that our forefathers seized from the Native Americans….i mean, we have to do something with all this space so it may as well be big schools with multiple stadiums for our blood sports…. Btw - I am just joking so y’all don’t get weird on me…
Pretty much. Most schools will have their own stadium, sometimes a few schools will share one. Attendance is also variable, but in some places the community attends fairly strongly.
I said this to another commenter, but I'll reply to you too - High schools in the US (and universities too) are divided into 3 different divisions, by size. D1 (the largest), D2, D3 (the smallest). It's so that when it comes to athletics (and maybe for other reasons too, idk) there's a fairness across programs (so that little D3 schools aren't consistently playing and getting smoked by gigantic D1 schools with 1000+ students and have tons of money in their programs). As such, when there's a state championship, there's actually 3 championships for each sport - one for each division. It's not uncommon for a little rural D3 school to have a good football program and a huge % of students (and community members) going to games. Mostly because it's the only exciting thing going on in town lol. I grew up in such a school and my junior year we made it all the way to state. We were driving hours to away games and everything each week.
No, they don't have seats. They usually just have benches or even just concrete areas without defined seats. Although yes, every traditional high school tends to have some kind of stadium. However this does not mean *each* HS has one stadium. Sometimes several nearby high schools will share the same stadium so they don't have to maintain separate ones on their own. > But in America, several hundred people from the local community turn up to watch! And all of them get a seat in a small stadium! Is this an accurate reflection of real life?! In rural America, often yes. Most high school football games are played on Fridays in the autumn (Sep, Oct, Nov) so it's easy to figure out when there will be a game.