Tiny Texas School District, Big-Time Vision: Plains ISD Planning $21M Sports Complex

A small town in Texas will soon be home to a state-of-the-art building.

The Plains Independent School District, located in the western part of the Lone Star State, announced the development of a $21 million sports complex.

According to records from the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, the facility will include a two-story (50-yard) football field (and an end zone) with locker rooms, coach’s offices, a weight room and a film training room.

Construction of the 58,500-square-foot facility tentatively begins on April 15 of this year and is set to conclude on October 15 next year.

Plains ISD provided a statement about the project on its Facebook page: “The Plains ISD board of trustees (recently) held a special meeting last night to finalize the plans and budget for the new field house project. We’d like to extend a sincere thank you to Greg Huseman and the team at Huseman Builders, along with architect Stephen Butler, for the tremendous amount of work that has gone into developing this project. Their efforts produced detailed plans for a beautiful, well-designed and highly functional field house that will serve our students and athletic programs for many years to come. We’re also pleased to report that the project is currently in line with projected costs, reflecting thoughtful planning and careful budgeting. The board approved the plans and budget, and we expect to break ground very soon. This project will create a first-class football complex, provide outstanding facilities for our students and coaches, and serve as a strong recruiting tool for our athletic programs moving forward. We’re excited about what this means for the future of Plains ISD and our students.”

Scott Mills, superintendent of Plains ISD, told EverythingLubbock.com that the district’s current football facility hasn’t been worked on for nearly 50 years.

The location for the new facility will be on a hill next to the Cowboys’ football field. The complex itself will be a “multi-purpose facility,” Mills said.

“We’ve got phenomenal facilities everywhere but down there, so that was part of the thinking behind it,” Mills said via EverythingLubbock.com. “But as far as this whole project coming together, this is all about the community side of the term ‘school community,’ because this project’s going to be part of the community.”

Mills continued, “We’re going to have it because all of our athletic programs will benefit in some way, shape or form. Then we’re going to have features in this project that even our band kids, our theater kids...that there’s going to be a film room in there. We’re going to let them use that film room and there’s a hospitality room that’s going to be in there that we’re going to build up.”

Doug Samuels of FootballScoop provided some context on the size of the town of Plains and the enrollment at Plains ISD.

The town itself has roughly 1,400 residents. Yoakum County, which has Plains as its county seat, has close to 7,700 residents.

The district, kindergarten through 12th grade, has more than 420 students enrolled at its schools. Almost 130 students are enrolled at Plains High School, which means around 30 kids are in grades 9 through 12 each.

According to Mills, plans for the complex have been 10 years in the making.

“We’re very blessed here to be a very oil rich, mineral rich, school district. That’s part of the process of doing a bond is taking advantage of those blessings that we have,” Mills said via EverythingLubbock.com. “That’s what this is all about, it’s about the kids and then giving it an opportunity for the community to have something special also as well.”

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