It’s no secret football is life in Texas. When your community continues to grow and fans are forced to stand throughout the game, a change has to be made.

Enter a new stadium. 

Tim Carroll, who is the director of public relations for Allen I.S.D., said that it was simply a matter of supply and demand. 

He said the new stadium is Allen's fifth since it began playing football in the 1930s. The previous stadium, which had a capacity of 7,000, was built in 1976 when the school district had about 5,000 students. By 1995, when the district had 9,000 students, the stadium was "woefully inadequate."

Today, Allen has 19,800 students in the district. "So we got significantly larger, and all of our facilities got larger, but the stadium did not," Carroll said. The solution was to put temporary seating in the corners of the end zone and surrounding the field.

Carroll said that resulted in 7,000 temporary seats, leased at $250,000 per year, in addition to 7,000 permanent seats and standing room only at every game.

The plans for the new stadium began in 1995, when the city planners realized that the city was going to continue to grow.

"In 1995, we decided we were going to build a new high school, new performing arts center and new stadium," Carroll said. "We waited until all of the elementary school was built before we started on the stadium. We did not want students in portable buildings while we were building a football stadium down the street."

In 2009, the citizens of Allen approved a $120 million bond referendum for a performing arts center, transportation services center and football stadium. Construction of the stadium was completed in time for the 2012 season.