Springfield High School Stadium Renovation 2026

Prodigy as the design professional of record

There is no separate architect or engineer on this project. Prodigy is the design professional of record and also the contractor, which removes the handoff most stadium projects are organized around — the point where drawings leave one firm and become another's problem to price, then return to the first the moment the field disagrees with them.

What that changes shows up where the contract expects the field to disagree. Before the new track asphalt is placed, existing gravel depth has to be verified as exceeding five inches. That is a real test with a real branch: if the stone is thin, the section changes. Under a split arrangement that becomes an RFI, a revised detail and a change order negotiated between two parties with opposite incentives. Here the party that wrote the section is the party standing on the stone.

The same is true of the demolition. The home bleachers come out with their foundations; the visitor bleachers come out with their foundations left in place. That is a design decision about existing conditions, made in front of the excavation rather than in an office months earlier. So is the seating layout, coordinated with the City of Springfield Planning and Development Department and arranged so no paved path is needed across the front of the stands. A separate designer would have drawn that path and a contractor would have priced it; one party carrying both eliminated it.

The check the district keeps is written into the same contract. Shop drawings go to the owner for approval before anything is fabricated, the city reviews the bleacher design, and the scope states its own boundaries — no undercutting and no asphalt base repairs are included. Single-source responsibility is worth having because someone can be held to lines that were drawn.

Fitting bleachers, track and scoreboard into one off-season

Work starts November 1, 2025 and substantial completion is set on or before August 1, 2026. Inside that window sit four scopes wanting the same ground, and their order is not a preference. It is set by what cures, what has to be surveyed, and what needs heavy equipment driven across the field.

The bleachers start first and finish late, because their long pole is approval rather than erection: the design is finalized with the city, shop drawings go to the owner, and only then is anything fabricated. Demolition runs in parallel — the existing systems come out and the asphalt between the track and the stands is removed on both sides. That opens the ground for the drainage system between the track and the new stands, which has to go in before anything is paved over the top of it.

The scoreboard belongs in the middle, not at the end. Cutting the old posts and utilities to no less than three inches below grade, backfilling, patching turf, then setting new posts and utilities in the new location is trenching and lifting work across ground nobody wants to cross once a finished surface is down.

The track is last for the same reason, and it has a fixed internal order of its own. The rubber and asphalt on the oval and high jump area are milled to base stone. Gravel depth is verified, the area fine graded and compacted, then two inches of ODOT base asphalt and an inch and a half of surface course in virgin mix go down. Only after that asphalt has cured can the Conica Conipur SP system go over it — a half-inch basemat and a dark blue structural spray. The long jump and pole vault runways keep their concrete; their old rubber is stripped and the surfaces cleaned so they take the same system on the same pass.

The lane lines come last of all, and that is the point worth making to anyone who has watched a track project run late. Markings are laid out to NFHS standards off the finished oval, surveyed on the surface that exists rather than the one that was demolished. Every hour of drainage, paving and scoreboard work that slips pushes against the one operation that cannot be started early and cannot be rushed.