BENTONVILLE (KFSM) -- It’s been in the works a long time and it’s finally here. Bentonville West High School now has its own football stadium.
Construction crews put the finishing touches on the stadium Monday. It is scheduled to open next month.
Bentonville West Head Coach, Bryan Pratt, has never coached his team on home turf.
‘’It’s really tough to build a program without somewhere you call home and a place to have the home field advantage,’’ said Coach Pratt.
Monday, Coach Pratt took a tour around the new Wolverine stadium.
‘’We haven’t had a stadium to call our own and now as we see it start coming together it’s real exciting time for us,’’ said Pratt.
To help pay for the $3.7 million stadium, Bentonville Board members authorized $1.8 million last year. This money will be paid back with sponsorship's over the next 15 years.
The sale of district property along with other funds will pay for the rest. One of the projects the additional money is paying for is a press box.
‘’It’ll be a two-story press box and we’re a little unique from some of the other places because we already have a press box on the visitor side we used before this stadium was built,’’ said Pratt.
Junior linebacker and receiver, Jonas Higson, is excited to see how many fans will fill the Wolverine stadium this season, ‘’they’ll be more excited because we’ll be at our stadium and we’ll have home side, we’ll have home bleachers, over here for us, so I think it’ll have an impact on how many people come and attend our games,’’ said Higson.
With the new stadium being able to seat 4,000 people, Coach Pratt expects the bleachers to be filled and fans on their feet, ‘’people standing around the fence was just kind of our anticipation of what we want to happen, and so it’s going to be a really cool environment for high school football,’’ said Pratt.
Coach Pratt is hoping to continue his team’s success at an official home stadium.
‘’It’s exciting, it’s one of those things, where you hope you can win some football games, and right now we’ve done that in the past, so we hope we continue it and you never know we may host a couple playoff games here,’’ said Pratt.
The first game the Wolverines are scheduled to play at the new stadium is August 31 against Fort Smith Southside.