We don’t need Jerry Maguire to tell us that sports have become the driver behind much of modern economic life. ESPN is the single most expensive item in any major cable venue, and Time Warner earlier this year paid the equivalent the annual GDP of Nicaragua for the rights to broadcast the Los Angeles Dodgers for the next quarter century. It’s not surprising that the effect is being felt down to the K-12 academic level, with more than one million-dollar high school football stadiums in the Lone Star state, the ultimate locus of Friday Night Lights.
But academic sports can also have a significant effect on schools well below the seven-figure threshold. Eastern High School, in Voorhees, New Jersey, a regional district school with 2,100 students has a 2,500-seat multi-season stadium used for football, field hockey, and track and field events, as well as a sizable gymnasium used for basketball. Last June, the school faced the usual quandary about where to hold its graduation ceremony: outside in the stadium or indoors in the gym in the event of rain. Rain had been forecast, so the school rented a portable PA system for the gym, as it usually did. Then the weather changed — it turned out sunny and gorgeous, and Eastern was stuck paying for a PA it didn’t need. That precipitated a change in more than the weather.
“The district superintendant said, ‘That’s not going to happen again,’” recalls Phil Smart, Eastern’s vice principal of Athletics. “So we decided we would put a good sound system in the gym and be able to use it for everything we use that space for — sports and other events.”
Smart used a list of approved vendors for A/V systems compiled by the New Jersey Interscholastic Athletics Association and requested bids from about a dozen A/V systems integrators. The responses ranged from basic printed bids to full-on system demos in the gym. JD Sound and Video, a vendor with one of the most elaborate demonstrations, won the bid. Owner Joe DiSabatino temporarily hung speakers covering half the gym to show how the Community Sound speakers he was recommending would cover the space. Once the system was installed, the response from teachers, coaches, parents and students was so positive that it led to the decision to improve the sound in the stadium, in part to direct sound away from the growing neighborhoods around the stadium, which had been creating a growing number of noise complaints as more houses were built around it.
With a budget of $30,000, JD Sound & Video worked around the four Community R-Series model R2-474 loudspeakers on light poles that were already in place in the stadium (two at both ends of the home team bleachers), adding Polar Focus brackets and re-aiming the R2s for better coverage. JD then added a pair of WET Series W2-218s on the press box to cover the home-team bleachers and delayed the original R2s to avoid artificial echoes, as well as an R2-52 on the press box aimed to cover the visiting team bleachers. The integrator also installed a pair of weatherized Community iBOX dual 15-inch i215 subwoofers under the bleachers to provide low-frequency support for Eastern’s pep rallies and special events across the entire field.
Electronics are located in the press box and include a Rane mixer, Shure wireless microphone system and Crown amplifiers. JD installed a Community dSPEC DSP loudspeaker processor for equalization, delay and loudspeaker optimization. In addition, JD added an Apple iPod/iPhone input at trackside with a microphone input, volume control and key switch. For practices or simple events, this setup allows coaches or students to operate the system without accessing the main controls in the press box.
“The system is designed so that no one really needs any more control than that,” says Smart, noting that all other parameters of the systems, such as EQ and speaker
