Parents dancing to popular songs on the basketball court. A student mariachi group strumming guitars and singing while greeting classmates and visitors in the foyer. Parents of student-athletes taking photos with their children.
It was a festive scene Thursday evening as a crowd gathered to open Highlands High School’s new gym — dubbed the Owls’ Nest — which replaces a 66-year-old gym at the Southeast Side campus.
“This was a long time coming,” Principal Penny Pruitt told an audience gathered for a grand opening pep rally, which included brief performances by the school band and spirit squads, salutes to various athletic teams and a mini–tailgate party.
Since the opening of the original campus gym in 1958, Highlands High School athletes played in the same main competition gym that had undergone few modifications over the decades.
The Thursday event marked a milestone in the largest portion of San Antonio ISD’s bond 2020 program at Highlands, a $49.6 million bond project that funded the renovation of 31,000 square feet of existing campus space and provided a 43,000-square-foot athletic addition.
The new gym complex features a secondary gym, with weight, locker, seminar and training rooms, and coaches’ offices. Work on some spaces around the gym building will not be finished until spring 2025, SAISD officials said.
District 3 Trustee Leticia Ozuna said the $1.3 billion bond has been a chance for SAISD officials to upgrade aging facilities districtwide.
“One of the great things about an SAISD education is that we think of the whole student. Their ability to do sports and fine arts is as important as their academic capabilities. And the way that we prove it to our students, community and staff is to invest in buildings like this,” she said.
Ozuna and Pruitt said many of the functional features — such as mechanical bleachers and a mat room for wrestlers — at Highlands’ new gym should prove attractive to students.
The ceiling above interior hallways bears hundreds of metallic cutouts of owl faces emblematic of the school mascot.
The new gym is connected to the main campus building, giving students a sense of security and safety from things such as the weather or potential external threats, Pruitt said.
“I think that it brings a tremendous amount of pride to the community and to Highlands. We have a lot of pride in being Owls,” Pruitt said. “It means so much to the students. They are so excited. And I’m excited for the coaches who work so hard and put in so many hours.”
Pruitt said engaging students, staff, coaches and community members was integral in designing and building a new gym. That way, she added, people placed more trust in the bond-funded project.
“Community input was extremely important,” Pruitt said. “We took the designs to the coaches, the kids and the community. They got to put little dots on what they liked and what they didn’t like. Then we went back to the drawing board.”
Student-athletes such as senior girls basketball player Savannah Gaskin said the contrasts between the old and new gyms at Highlands are striking.
“The new gym is really great. It’s very big, has air conditioning and the court floor has a great grip,” Gaskin said. “I love our locker room, too. There’s so much space in there, and I’m just very happy to be a part of this.”
Tracy Guadarrama, girls’ athletic coordinator, graduated from Highlands in 1997. She recalled the old gym having neither air conditioning nor individual shower stalls with curtains.
Guadarrama also said the old competition gyms were disconnected from other student-athlete spaces and resources. The new gym, she added, is a major boost for current and future students.
“We were in construction for a year and a half with very limited facilities. So, when the kids walked into the new facilities for the first time, there were a lot of actual ‘wows’ coming out of their mouths. And they were like, ‘Oh, we’re a rich campus now,’” Guadarrama said with a laugh.
“But with things like that, you could feel and hear that the pride was resonating with them.”
