Cobb Schools to pay half of McEachern’s $16 million stadium rebuild

Cobb County Schools has agreed to pay about half of McEachern’s $16 million project to replace the home stands at Cantrell Stadium, formerly the largest on-campus high school football stadium in Georgia.

The project, to be completed in August 2027, will reduce stadium capacity to 6,705 from its previous of nearly 13,000.

The stadium will have metal bleachers instead of the 45-year-old concrete that was coming apart, leading to the home side being condemned last year.

“It will be nice when it’s done,” McEachern football coach Kareem Reid said Thursday. “It won’t be as long (in width) as the original (grandstand), but there will be additional locker rooms and rest rooms, so maybe it worked out as a blessing in disguise.”

As it did in 2025, McEachern will play its home games using the visitors side, which holds 2,200. Those stands were built in 1970 and originally served as home bleachers. There are an additional 1,674 end-zone seats.

The school district announced at a board meeting June 11 that it had approved providing $8.4 million to the project. Some media reported the news incorrectly, Cobb County Schools public information officer Brooke Zauner said Thursday.

“That funding is not additional cost on top of the project but rather reduces what the school district has to pay for that portion of the work,” she told the AJC in an email.

Since March, the board has approved about $16.1 million total for Cantrell Stadium. The McEachern Endowment Fund will pay $7.5 million of that total cost. That includes the cost of demolition, stormwater work and the new grandstand, Zauner said.

The old concrete stands, completed in 1981, were crumbling, giving McEachern no choice but to rebuild.

“Home side was showing deterioration many years ago,” said Jimmy Dorsey, who came to McEachern as football coach in 1984 and retired as athletic director in 2019. “Pretty sure it was built with substandard concrete.”

Cobb County superintendent Chris Ragsdale also vented about the original build at the board meeting.

“We drive over bridges made of concrete every day that have been here for 50, 60, 70 years, and you expect that to be the case,” he said. “Unfortunately, what we have seen in this particular stands was not the case. And significant enough damage and erosion was present, and that’s why the initial architects out there to do the inspection found this and notified us. We had to immediately render this stands as unusable. So, no, this was not expected. No, this was not budgeted.”

With support from the endowment fund, McEachern’s football stadium has long been Cobb County’s biggest and best-equipped and has been the site of county and statewide events, including the GHSA soccer finals.

Tapping into the fund in 2003, McEachern spent $1.2 million to become the first Georgia high school to install artificial turf on its football field, then paid again to replace it 10 years later.