Boardman High School's New Stadium Rocks with Community

Replacing an aging venue completed in 1941, Boardman High School's new Spartan Stadium is a modern, multi-sport facility seating 7,200 fans. The stadium boasts an artificial turf playing field, a 35' video scoreboard, a large press box with a video replay studio, and a high-quality audio system using Community Professional R SERIES loudspeakers.

The stadium has now completed Phase 2 of a three-phase construction project. Phase 3 will include an expanded parking lot with "tail-gate" area, a new concessions building, expanded locker rooms and a band shell.

Boardman chose Custom Integrated Solutions, LLC, of Youngstown, OH to design and install its new stadium audio system along with its Wi-Fi and security systems. Brian Williams of CIS explained the school's audio system goals.

"Boardman wanted clear, intelligible announcements for the stands and the field and they wanted a music-quality system with enough power to generate a high level of fan excitement." Tim Saxton, Boardman's director of operations added, "We rejected a scoreboard system because the sound would have traveled down the field and out into the neighborhood."

To achieve the school's goals, CIS's Williams chose a distributed system design. For the home-team bleachers and field, he installed two pairs of Community R.5-66MAX loudspeakers on light poles at either end of the stands and a pair of R.5-96MAX loudspeakers on the press box for the center of the home stands. A fifth R.5 -66MAX on one of the light poles covers a tail-gate area to be completed next year and four R.5-66TZ loudspeakers serve the away-team stands. A pair of R2SUB subwoofers, located under the home-team stands, adds high-level low-frequency punch for the Spartan's music-video style fight song. The loudspeakers are managed by a Community dSPEC DSP system and powered by Lab Gruppen amplifiers.

The system includes a Denon AM/FM/CD player, push-to-talk announce mics for the play-by-play announcer and video playback team, Sennheiser body-pack wireless mics for the referees and a hand-held wireless mic for field use. An Allen and Heath digital mixer, installed in the rack, allows the stadium announcer to mix and control the system from an iPad.

On September 4, a capacity crowd witnessed the grand opening Spartan's football game that began with a dramatic parachute jump onto the field to deliver the game ball. Saxton says, "The first time we played the team's fight song, the subwoofers kicked in and the opening-night fans looked like they were on an amusement park ride -- they were pretty excited!"