The Orange Beach City Council unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday night supporting the construction of a $46 million athletic facility on the Orange Beach Middle and High School campus.

Superintendent Randy Wilkes said the plan is to break ground on the facility next month with completion estimated to be May 30, 2025.

The facility will include a 3,500-seat football stadium, a 1,200-seat competitive gymnasium, a two-story Kinesiology and Exercise Science Building, an eight-lane track and a multi-purpose pavilion.

“When I came in, they asked me to do a quick evaluation of growth and enrollment and what the needs were,” Wilkes told AL.com. “This has been on our capital plan since we’ve been here. Just to see it come to fruition is a tremendous accomplishment. To get the school board to vote 5-0 and the city council to vote 6-0 is pretty unprecedented this day and time. I want to express sincere appreciation to the city council especially for putting the needs of students above everything else.”

Wilkes said the school board voted on Oct. 10 to approve the bid award to Bear Construction of Pensacola for $46,162,000 before the council approved the resolution on Tuesday.

“I want to thank the council for their vision and supporting this project,” Orange Beach mayor Tony Kennon said. “We are short on facilities, and we’ve got to have them. We really have no choice and, if we are doing to do it, we are going to do it in a state-of-the-art fashion and that’s what we’ve done.”

Wilkes said the facilities with be city funded as part of the capital plan with no tax increase. He said the new complex will fill a huge need for Orange Beach student-athletes.

“A lot of these facilities we’ve not had before,” he said. “We have track teams with nowhere to practice. We have cheerleaders that go to the elementary school to practice. We have wrestlers that don’t have a place to wrestle or practice. Today, we’ve got seven basketball teams that need to practice at a middle school type gym, but we are hosting the first round of volleyball state playoffs. There is no way that seven basketball teams and five volleyball teams can use that same facility. Right now, our weight room is in a storage unit where we’ve taken out the walls, and this is their second location in two years.”

Wilkes said, if the facilities were in use today, approximately 80 percent of all students would benefit directly from them.

“I’ve seen the facilities at Thompson and what (superintendent) Aaron (Milner) and those guys have done at Saraland,” he said. “Those facilities become the most used facilities at the school. They are 100-year type facilities. Generations of student athletes and students will benefit from what the city had done and what the school board has done here.”

Orange Beach currently completes in Class 4A, and Wilkes said he expects the school will remain at that level in the reclassification later this year.

“We know any extracurricular activities, athletics included, leads to a better student and a better citizen. That has been proven over and over again,” Kennon said. “Anything that benefits our children benefits our community as a whole.”

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