Mustang Stadium to get new bleachers

Photo by Ralph Arvesen

Mustang Stadium will be receiving new home bleachers after the Marble Falls Independent School District’s Board of Trustees approved purchasing 1,377 seating chairs during its regular meeting April 20.

The purchase and installation is from Sturdisteel Grandstand and Press Box for $399,450. This company performed the same task at Mustang Stadium when it first opened. A month earlier, when Marble Falls ISD Maintenance Director Eric Humiston presented the first reading to the board, he said that he believed “this is all paid by insurance. So we got compensated for it through the hailstorm.”

Humiston had advised board members to choose the bleacher colors when they approved the item.

“The board approved the purple and light gray purchase,” said Dr. Jeff Gasaway, the school district’s superintendent. “We did not like the outline color choices, which would have outlined the MFH. It was a choice between a tan or gold. But neither were Marble Falls gold.”

Only one chair will be a different color. A red chair also was purchased to continue to honor the memory of Brother Max Copeland, who died May 25, 2015. Copeland, who was the longtime pastor of Marble Falls First Baptist Church, is believed to have attended more Marble Falls contests played by various ages than any resident. He said that he “loved the Mustangs” all his life. He attended numerous banquets, meals, award ceremonies and other functions where he shared his faith and example wearing red suspenders and socks.

When Humiston made the original presentation a month earlier, he told board members what he and his team have experienced at the stadium, color options on the bleachers, the challenges the installation company is facing in terms of when the bleachers will be installed, and other information.

“The seats right now have some holes,” he said. “We’ve been taping them for safety for the past couple of years. They’re at the end of their useful life.”

Much of the reason was because of the age of the stadium, which was opened in 2010, and the wear and tear on the seats. After all, Mustang Stadium is where the football and soccer teams all play their home games, youth and middle school football games, where the band marches and the Starlettes rehearse their half-time shows and perform, graduation ceremonies and other events.

And those events draw hundreds of spectators.

“They’ve replaced a lot of those seats,” athletic director and football head coach Keri Timmerman said. “They’ve had some broken seats, small things that even when I got here, I’ve seen a bit of change. It was just one of those things that, as we’ve gone through, we’ve done a lot of little upgrades that probably don’t go unnoticed, like the steel on the stadium signs, updating the steel on the front of the front entrance signs on the Manzano entrance of the stadium, adding the pole covers and stuff like that, just little things. It just it made sense with the upgrades we’re making with (artificial) turf being redone in about a year and a half and then doing that scoreboard and then just adding the baseball facility. It just kind of keeps everything looking like it was brought up together.”

Humiston pointed out the value of getting everything lined up for the work.

“Choosing a color will be exponential to get it moving and get us in the mill to get these ordered,” he said. “The lead time on this stuff is huge. If we decided today to do it, it won’t be done by next football season. So that was one thing they let me know was these things take awhile to put together, to get ordered and to get made.”

“The one thing I do know is that this is very mesh,” Gasaway told the board a month ago. “There’s not a lot of companies out there that do stadium seats and so it a very small, little mesh group.”