Central Valley High to open stadium by August 2026. Here are its features

Since it opened in 2005, Central Valley High School has had to use Ceres High’s Bulldog Stadium when hosting sporting events. That will change in August 2026 when the Hawks have their own stadium, Ceres Unified School District announced Monday.

Stadium amenities will include home grandstand bleachers with about 1,800 seats and a pressbox, 1,000 grandstand bleachers for visitors, an all-weather track, an artificial field turf, an extended bus loading zone and locker rooms for the home and visiting teams.

“This is the last piece of the puzzle that makes Central Valley whole, and it’s going to be something to see,” athletic director Greg Magni said at the stadium groundbreaking.

And head football coach Derrick Goblirsch said the stadium will bring an end to that feeling that even so-called home games played at Ceres High were like “an away game every time.”

The project is being handled by Salida-based contractor JL Bray and Son and Fresno-based Darden Architects. James Bray, project manager for JL Bray and Son, said the new bus loading zones will be near the school’s softball field.

The project will be split into three phases with the first beginning this week, Bray said.

Ceres Unified spokesperson Beth Parker Jimenez stated in an email to The Bee that the project’s budget is $16.2 million.

Multiple community leaders attended and spoke at Monday’s ceremony, including Ceres Mayor Javier Lopez, City Councilmember Cerina Otero and state Sen. Marie Alvardo-Gil.

“Sports is important, education is important, but this is the fabric of our community, and I think that it’s important,” Lopez said.

In the past two years, new facilities have opened at Central Valley High. In December 2023, the school opened the Ricardo Campero Performing Arts Center. A $5.5 million aquatics center opened in spring 2024.

The stadium project “gives us the opportunity for our youth programs and other kids to dream about playing here, to see everything that it brings to the table, and wanting to be one day and be a Central Valley Hawk,” Magni said.

‘We have a home to finally call our own’

With the stadium to be used by multiple programs, Magni said teams can understand the idea of defending their own home field.

“It means we finally have a home to call our own,” he said. “It’s one thing to be the home team on the scoreboard, but not really the home team because it’s not your campus, it’s not your school.”

Goblirsch said having a home stadium is going to be amazing for the football program. “I feel like getting a new stadium here is really going to bring that new atmosphere to our school, and kind of really build our school culture and our school pride,” he said.

Before Goblirsch, Scott Edwards was the school’s football head coach. Currently, Edwards is a physical education teacher at Central Valley High. He was at the helm of its football program for six seasons.

Upon learning the news, Edwards admitted he had goosebumps when envisioning how home games would have looked and felt in the “Friday Night Lights” atmosphere if there was a stadium at the time.

He remembers that as head coach, the team’s home games at Ceres High didn’t have the authenticity that comes with hosting a team despite changing the decor, field markers and goal posts pads to “make it look like it’s our place.”

“It’s a massive hit to culture for these students in the past to not have a place to call home, to not have a varsity team room, to not have a field to take pride in, to have to pack everything and go to your rival school for home games,” Edwards said. “[It’s] even worse than that when the game was over, it was like our players were on their own to go back home.”

With the stadium opening around the same time a new school year begins, Edwards hopes incoming freshmen don’t take its presence for granted.

“About after three or four years when there’s not a student that had to go through that [to] travel to a home game, it’s going to be kind of taken for granted,” he said.

This story was originally published June 10, 2025 at 2:08 PM.