YOUR WEIGHT ROOM SUCKS

And the prodigal son that was produced in said weight room is coming to play for Texas next year. Giggity giggity

HOLY Bake Sale, Cookie Sale, Can & Bottle Drive, Christmas Reef Sale, Popcorn Tin Sale, Candy Sale, Car Wash, and please just give to our poor lil’ football team BATMAN!!

And that’s a 4-A school. There’s 5-A to go, peeps.

I’m a Native Texan and this does absolutely nothing to surprise me. From the people who brought the nation No Child Left Behind! Boom! Chakalaka!

As Byrnes in SC has taught us, higher property taxes = state championships. Higher property taxes and a maniacal obsession to high school football that begins on the Pop Warner level with mandatory playbooks.

I would hope that said school has a booster club that pays for the majority of this sort of thing, or let’s go nutty and have the county or city issue bonds to build high school stadiums and weight rooms.

It’s comically insane.

Does anyone know, is this an ultra-wealthy school district, so that this sort of ridiculous display doesn’t necessarily mean funding is being lost elsewhere (of course, it could all be booster money, which it probably is).

Or, it this one of those football-crazed southern schools where priorities are askew and everything but the football facilities are shit?

Just out of curiousity – are they perennial state champs? If not, why not?

you want to see/read about an insane football program, check out southlake carroll here in dallas.

from this article:

“If their parents were lucky enough to snag Carroll season tickets—which cost $75 on top of the $50 required for the right to buy the tickets—those same kids will be flocking to the $15.3?million, 11,000-seat Dragon Stadium, a six-year-old facility. Because the stadium is four miles off-campus, the team uses a $6?million on-campus indoor practice facility that’s so state-of-the-art, the Dallas Cowboys borrowed it a few times in 2001.”

hi, we’re the dallas freakin’ cowboys, do you mind if we use your high school facility??

Duh… Texas…. note the rainbow shaded weights on the racks… that’s all Austin.

Lake Travis passed on Gene Chizik.

@5: The facilities like the LT one above, the one at SLC in the artilcle, the one in Allen—which is mind boggling—are funded by boosters.

Lake Travis is just west of Austin, and there is a high concentration of Dell millionaires out there. I’m guessing it was the booster club that paid for that. But damn.

Looks like drug money to me. Do you want to meet my little friend?

Well, do yah?

On the flip side, check out this picture of the average high school football weight room in Michigan:

http://media.sacbee.com/smedia/2008/03/05/20/732-4M6CRISTO.embedded.prod_affiliate.4.JPG

an explanation for Appalachian State & Toledo???

Man, I so could have played D-1 if my high school had that kind of facility, yup, that was the only thing stopping me…

In a related photo, please see their INDOOR FACILITY that even the UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA does not have.

http://www.ltcavalierfootball.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/ParentMeeting/Turf2.jpg

My High School’s weight room looked as good as that. All bought and paid for by Alabama boosters, which is completely legal.

And we were 3A then 4A now and the highest in Alabama is 6A.

Per the earlier note by CD @ #11, Lake Travis H.S. is just outside of Austin and has been there for a while now. About 15 years ago that area was considered pretty remote within about 25-30 minutes of the Austin city limits. Austin has just boomed as have these suburbs to the west that are popping up along the Austin area lakes. So, even if it was done via city/county money, the population spike would have helped that.

But I do think that it was donated via boosters.

Per Wikipedia:
The Lake Travis High School football program has a recently constructed an indoor turf room along with a state-of-the-art weightroom. The weightroom is currently the largest high school weight room in the state of Texas

Damn if my high school had a weight room like this I wouldn’t have played football. Fuck that shit. My knees hurt just looking at that.

Seems pretty reasonable, how else can the coaches go out and recruit those 13 and 14 year old Jr. High studs to come to their school to “learn?”

Sorry, high school football is unwatchable. And if you pay a “seat license” for HS season tickets, you are a big time sucker.

Sales pitch to the moms: “But honey, we won’t have to worry about our son dying of heatstroke when the coach works him too hard.” Ok here’s 1,000 dollars.

I heard that the LT indoor facility even has a section for fathers to stand in so they can coach their own children and/or deride their lack of effort/boast.

#8, yeah, rainbows… but I dunno. This pic certainly doesn’t radiate that “Keep Austin Weird” vibe. “Keep Kamino Cloned” maybe.

#20
I must disagree. I enjoy high school football, and go to 6 or 7 games every fall. My daughter was a cheerleader a couple years ago, so I went to support her at first, but soon caught caught up in the excitement because her High School went undefeated until the State semi-final game (2 years in a row).

Since then, I have divorced and moved about 65 miles away from where we lived, but still go to watch high school football. I became friends with one of the local high school coaches and his girlfriend who happens to coach for Dakota H.S. who has won the State Championship several years here in Michigan.

Very entertaining, although I wouldn’t pay much more than the $5 it costs to get in.

Charlie Sadler coached high school, and failed miserably? Charlie Sadler was a bad head coach at Northern Illinois (if it’s the same guy).

“If you’re not sitting below the Mason-Dixon line right now and you’re wondering: do I care too much about football? The answer is no. You’re fine.

We’re hopeless cases, though. 12 steps wouldn’t get us off the front porch of our estate of addiction. " – Orson Swindle

@10

I live in Allen. This is how insane high school sports are in texas. Allen has almost 100,000 people (suburb of Dallas), and exactly 1, yes 1, high school. Not 1 public and 1 or 2 private, but 1 high school total. The reason? Don’t want to deplete the football recruiting base.

@ 27
I asked a guy from Allen how many kids were in the marching band—since they can’t really march anywhere because the band covers the entire field between the 5 yard lines. He said he thought it was about 620.

“New Season. Same Reason.”

Awesome.

I forwarded that link to my buddy, the high school coach at Macomb Dakota (a very successful program up here) and his response:

“Wow! That gives me some ideas, but we gotta get WAY better boosters. Ha”

Considering what’s going on with the Michigan economy, I’m thinking the only way my friend can end up in facilities even close to those are to polish up the ol’ resume and move south.

What the hell do Texas teams need with indoor practice facilities? It’s nice year-round for Jeebus’ sake. We practiced outdoors on frozen fields in sleet, rain, snow, tornadoes, locusts and grasshopper swarms while being watched over by at least two horsemen of the apocalypse at my Nebraska high school. I can’t even imagine what you Michigan kids had to put up with.

Plus, our weightroom could have fit in one of the end zones of that facility.

It reminds me of the facilities when I played in 78’. Well, except that we had one bench, a couple of curl bars and a matching dumbbell set. Oh, and I almost forgot, our weight room was also the locker room and showers. Other than that it was exactly the same.

@31, probably because it’s so hot it would melt the paint off a pickup truck somedays. just a hunch. (Can’t play if you’re stuck full of IV drips)

Potentially stupid question- in Texas are the divisions within Classes just determined by student body size or are there other factors?

And this is why Todd Resing kicks your ass at 5’11".

Hell, I played in 6A in Alabama, one of the most talented and physically demanding classes of football in Alabama that produced many Div 1 freshmen starters for Alabama/Auburn and many went on to start in the NFL…..what did we have to train on?
This:
http://www.promedproducts.com/showimage.asp?item=60049L.jpg

Most of the time, our coach would “take our word for it” that we had done our lifts, basically he would go take a nap in the coaches office, we would have a lookout, when he left, we would bullshit about chicks and getting drunk, when we got the signal to get busy, he would come in about 45 mins later and see us busting our asses for about 2 good sets, he would say “good work men, I see most of you have made all of your lifts”, we just had to be sure to be on a different piece of equipment than what he last saw us on….annnnnd we went 3-7….while Vigor won back to back State Championships and a National Championship, and they didnt even have a weight room, just a dilapitated shack with Weider concrete weights…..seriously……

Just the boxes that all of that gear came in wouldn’t fit in my old high school’s weight room.

Maybe if you actually did all your lifts you would have won more games

This is how we do it in Texas, bitches. This is one reason we put out more talent into the college ranks, win more games, and pillage more cheerleaders than any other state.

While your weak-ass state plays hockey and wrestles in gay tights, we build champions. So what if our test scores may be a little lower than yours… we’ll kick your ass and pull a Fredo with your Mom and your Sister.

Don’t Mess with Texas!

Go here to see the indoor practice facility at LT. Going for send straight State Championship and 30 wins in a row on Saturday!!!!

http://www.ltcavalierfootball.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/ParentMeeting/Turf2.jpg

I’m pretty sure Lake Travis is a 4a, not 5a school in this fine state. This is not Southlake Carroll (a whole nother thing), it is the next to biggest class.

@33, classifications are dictated by just enrollment.
5A – 2,085 and up
4A – 980-2,084
3A – 430-979
2A – 200-429
1A – 199 and below

My highschool weight room was under the gym bleachers.

Facilities like these are all over the place. Check out Jenks, OK (suburb of Tulsa, OK). http://jenkstrojanfootball.com/end_zone_plans.html. Tulsa Union, Tulsa suburb Broken Arrow and Tulsa suburb Owasso have similar facilities. Tulsa Union built a $20MM sports facility where they have college conference basketball tourneys.

When USC and Pete Carroll practiced at Bentonville HS in Arkansas (home of Walmart) before playing in Fayetteville in 2006, Carroll said the facilities were nicer than the practice facilities they used on campus.

BOOMER!

Yes, football is a big deal in Texas just like Ohio and Florida. We do pay our share of taxes, here in western Travis County to help pay for the infrastructure at the school and other extra activities the students participate. The school sends approximately 100 students to debate and speech tournaments several times a year. We have several new buildings within the High School. Multiple sports use the weight room and turf room, including girl’s volleyball. The coaches demand good grades from the players and provide the ability to miss practice to attend tutoring sessions. Athletics, band, and drill team provides hundreds of the 2000 student’s opportunities to improve themselves and participate in productive activities throughout high school. For one my son is in much better physical condition than if he was not hitting the weight room on a regular basis, his grades do not suffer and he has plenty of time for other activities. By the way this is not the wealthiest school district in the area. That honor goes to Eanes School district where Drew Brees attended Westlake High School.

One other thing the fathers do not stand around and “coach” the boys during practice.

i go to lake travis hs and we are back to back state champs and are school is considered to look like a small university according to everyone.

Lake Travis HS is located about 25 minutes from downtown Austin. It is about 15 Minutes from Westlake HS who has major Texas 5A Football Program. There facilities in inline with Lake Travis.

The HS is structured like a college hence the comments “The University of Lake Travvis High School” Education is priority #1 at this School and Football rules the land, howver that is not to say the Lake Travis is a one sport school. LT competes for State Championships at all level for both Girls and Boys. Girls Tennis, Volleyball, Softball are outstanding as is the Boys Baseball and Basketball.

The Lake Travis community is comprised of Upper Middle Class and Wealthy Families, however the school also cover lower income neighborhoods. It is a healthy mix for the school and the community. We are proud of school and our kids.

Oh yeah, we were the best team in the State of Texas last year including 5A Teams and more than likely one of the Top 2 Teams in the Country. Too bad there is not a HS Playoff System! I know its HIgh School!

Im in the marching band and right now is band camp and we use that turf room, its only 50 yards xD

But seriously that thing is great, its a good 10 degrees cooler in there and there is no sun

btw in texas there is whats called a robin hood tax, the rich districts give to the poor, so despite our property tax a lot of it goes to poorer districts :/

Btw, not all of our money goes into football, band has some good support, and theater just threw a very expensive show, though a lot of that is from boosters I think haha

As for the weight room…… Pretty much only football uses that in my experience, the band tired but we would need a personal trainer