Venue News: Allen, TX, High School Plans $60M Stadium

Allen High School in Collin County, TX, will break ground on a $60 million, 18,000-seat stadium. The school, which boasts 5,000 students and a 650-student marching band, has seen its Allen Eagles football team attract more than 8,000 fans to away games. The stadium will be the fifth-largest high school football complex in Texas and the second-largest to open since 2003…

…Sunburst Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of the Tampa Bay Rays, is in discussions with the University of South Florida to help ticket sales for the athletic department’s football and basketball programs. Although talks are preliminary on both sides, Sunburst has worked with USF in the past on its video production in the Sun Dome, the 55,000-seat facility on the USF campus. Sunburst Entertainment has sold group tickets during the past two years for the Beef ‘O’ Brady Bowl Game, hosted at Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays…

…The Houston Astros and Minute Maid Park are set to introduce MLB At Bat’s concession-ordering application for iPhones. With Aramark, Minute Maid Park’s concession provider, the mobile application will allow users to order food and drinks by downloading the free application and selecting concessions from stadium menus. Customers will be able to access At Bat Express lines at three stands on the main concourse and two stands in the upper level to pick up their food after receiving a text-message notification. The smartphone technology encompasses Astros sponsor AT&T and Minute Maid Park’s enhanced Wi-Fi coverage and distributed antenna system within the stadium…

…Minneapolis’s Target Center, home to the NBA Minnesota Timberwolves and WNBA Minnesota Lynx, will host a reunion matchup of the 1992 U.S. Davis Cup team. Featuring Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, and John McEnroe, the Sept. 30 event, one of 12 stops announced for the reformatted Champions Series tour, will be played in the same 20,500-seat downtown arena where Agassi, Courier, and McEnroe teamed up to defeat Sweden in 1992; they eventually took home the championship, beating Switzerland in Fort Worth, TX.