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oneontafan
Starting Member
3 Posts |
 Posted - 09/18/2024 : 09:13:21
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My wife (disabled) and I are in our 70s, and when we go to an away game at a stadium we've never been to before, we need information like:
>Are there fees for parking? Card? Cash only?
How many people carry cash nowadays?
>Is there a visitor parking lot and a visitor gate nearby?
Or do they expect you to walk a quarter mile to the main gate?
>Concession stand - card, app,or cash?
We can do all three, but it's nice to know before you go.
>Where and how many handicap spaces are there?
Most handicapped people are not in wheelchairs and simply have trouble walking a long distance. It doesn't help if the handicap spots are a hundred yards or more from the gate. We've seen one stadium where the parking lots were a block from the stadium!
>Are there restrooms on the visitor side?
Again, some people have trouble walking all the way around a football field.
I'm familiar with stadiumconnection.com, but it gives only basic information about each stadium. I can see aerial views of stadiums on Google maps, but that doesn't help much.
Is there any single place to go online to get detailed information?
What we've been doing is calling the schools, but most times the people we're talking to have almost no clue about it. Seems like it would be a trivial task to put ALL of that information + a map of the stadium, entry gates, parking lots, etc on the school website. Ever been to a school website? They're abysmal. Rarely updated and rarely maintained.
Don't get me started about the handful of schools that don't even have visitor bleachers. |
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dparker
Forum Admin
1432 Posts |
Posted - 09/18/2024 : 13:09:49
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It would be a massive undertaking to get all this information in one place for all the over 400 high schools in Alabama. Almost the only way would be to visit each stadium and take notes.
The other problem is the constant changes being made by each school to stadiums and how they approach each game. Most stadiums are used five times a year where crowds are involved as most events other than a varsity football game do not pose problems for most schools. Many stadiums are at the high schools and therefore do not have ample parking especially for handicapped individuals.
Years ago I captured an aerial view of each stadium along with a map to the stadium. Then Google maps said I could no longer do that on the website. At one time I had a weather report for each game but the weather app said I could not do that any long so these things disappeared.
But you do pose a possible solution to the problem. When I started AHSFHS.org some 17 years ago there was nothing much about the history of high school football in the state. So there you go. Start small and work outward. Get someone to start a website and add to it as new things about each stadium are found. Over time you'll have them all.
The lesson here is that everything changes over time so you would need to update the information constantly just like I have to do with the radio stations covering high school football each season. The only thing that does not change is history. That is why we deal mostly with the history side of sports.
If you only knew how difficult it was to find the head coach for every sport you would understand the difficulty of getting accurate information.
Good luck to you.
David Parker
Administrator
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oneontafan
Starting Member
3 Posts |
Posted - 09/18/2024 : 14:50:13
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The easiest, best way would be for the schools to do it and publish the information. It would take one person maybe an hour. Aerial drone shot, mark the information on the drone shot in Photoshop, and upload the annotated image to the school's website. They just need motivation because they don't see a problem.
I have this season and next season to attend high school football games and then I run out of grandchildren who play. The last one is a junior at Moody. By the time the great-grandsons get old enough to play, I'll be too old to go.
I have attended high school football games all over Alabama (and a couple of other states) from Mobile and Baldwin counties to Scottsboro, and from Red Bay to Lanett. For nearly all of those games I was much younger and none of this mattered.
I appreciate the work you do gathering all the information about the teams and games. It's one of my go-to references.
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Stadium information
