Teams’ facilities put the ‘OK’ in ‘OK-lahoma’

Every now and then, you run across something that boggles the mind.

That was certainly true last week, when a friend sent me via e-mail the Internet address of a high school football program out in Oklahoma.

The high school Website showed a new football facility, actually a new wellness and fitness center built in the north endzone of the Jenks High School football field.

It’s a $5 million fitness center, to be exact. Now, when I first saw this I thought to myself ‘this has to be a private school,’ but it’s not.

Jenks High School is a public school in Jenks, Okla., a suburb of Tulsa, with an enrollment of over 2,100 students.

The 36,000-square-foot facility has three stories, with the first floor containing a weight room for the athletes at Jenks. The weight room is large enough for more than 60 student-athletes to perform strength training at the same time. The first floor also contains locker rooms for the football team and public restrooms.

The second floor of this high school facility is a health and fitness center that includes treadmills, elliptical machines and exercise bikes for a cardiovascular workout.

It also has a sports medicine and rehabilitation room to treat injuries, and has a hydrotherapy pool with an underwater treadmill.

The third floor is primarily office space for the athletic department, which includes a couple of conference rooms and a space for the Jenks High School Sports Hall of Fame.

Not a bad set-up for a public school.

Of course, this just isn’t any public school. The Jenks Trojans have captured 12 Oklahoma State Championships since 1979 and have dominated the football championship in Oklahoma over the past eight years, winning titles in 2000, 2001, 2003, 2006 and in 2007.

So my question is, what has been the driving force behind such a facility at a high school? Has it been their state championship football program, or did someone leave the school a lot of money?

From what I can tell, it’s a little bit of both, and the fact that the facility will be open to the public means some public funds were used to build this $5 million facility.

Now I’ve been to a lot of nice athletic facilities in my lifetime, but this one even makes a lot of college programs look like a junior pro league.

The only other place I know of that has any type of facility that you might compare this one to would be Ensworth. But Ensworth is a private school and I’m not sure even Tim McGraw’s money could build a facility like this one.

Good news for Warren County fans, the football program does have a building program going on in the form of a covered shed.

That’s right. A building, or shed unit, has been under construction for the past couple of months. It will be used mainly during the pre-season practice sessions to help combat the August heat, and it also serves as a storage facility.

So you see, Oklahoma’s not the only state that can throw a little money around for its high school football programs.

All joking aside, this is a wonderful facility and by letting the general public have access to health and fitness center it will help to off-set the cost.

So maybe we need to look into building multi-purpose facilities like this one. It could only be a win-win situation for not only the high school athletic programs, but for everyone in Warren County.

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E-mail Dale Stubblefield at [email protected]