The Aztexan

I went down to get a first-hand look at our new stadium today. And I took my camera: here's my 36-picture Nelson Field photo set on Flickr.

One slight difficulty in getting a view of the place was the fence. There's chain link fence around the stands, of course, and everything's chained up, as you'd expect. But the entire rest of the field is surrounded by a green, 8-foot-high, solid metal fence. You simply cannot see anything through it at all. I wondered if it was just for construction, but it looks pretty permanent to me. I'm not kidding when I say that a shorter correspondent would not have been able to get some of these pictures of the field. But, while not pretty, maybe this Green Monster will have a silver lining, if it keeps in all the home field noise of the crowd.

As you may be able to tell, I just walked all the way around the stadium — clockwise starting on the west side, if you're looking at the satellite view — snapping away as I went.

One thing you'll notice immediately is that the lovely grass soccer pitch visible in Google Maps' satellite view is no more. We knew that had been replaced in recent years with Field Turf, but you can see it in full color here, down to the bright white throwball lines. The track surrounding the field is all new, too, not that it makes much difference what color the big separator between the pitch and the stands is.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that it's more or less like Dragon Stadium, where the U-23s played this year. It is, after all, a high school football stadium. Granted that I didn't get a very close look. And, the field surface is new, which is good. But otherwise it doesn't seem either especially great, or especially terrible.

That's the stadium itself. The location is definitely an improvement, being much more central (obviously) than Round Rock High School was last season. Hopefully it will be that much easier for lots of folks to get to. As you can see in the pictures and the satellite view, there's a good deal of parking right around the stadium. I don't know if that's enough parking for a capacity crowd, but it's certainly got House Park beat on that count.

As visible in one picture, there's a Capital Metro bus stop right on the edge of the parking lot. It's for route 300; I don't know whether people will use that for game-day transportation or not.

There's still some scouting to be done to find the best nearby watering hole (Nomad Bar, about a mile and a half away, seems promising). And there's an El Regio stand very close by, too. You haven't had truly excellent chicken until you've had El Regio chicken (available in 2 sizes: half or whole).

For this post, I just wanted to make a quick fact-finding run and see it in person. What I found was about what I expected: a quiet, empty high school football stadium. Not anything awesome, but that's perfectly okay. We all know this isn't the ultimate home of the Austin Aztex. Look no further than the very announcement, in which the possibility of a future at House Park is already hinted at.

And even that, hopefully, isn't where our Aztex will wind up playing forever. Someday we'll have — Chantico willing — our very own stadium, just for our sport and just for our teams. Until then, Nelson Field will be more than fine.

The Aztex have a house; it'll be up to the team and the fans to make it a home!

Labels: stadium, USL-1