By Malcolm Butler
Cedar Creek School’s newest athletic facility may be filled with weight racks, turf and training equipment, but school officials believe its greatest impact will be on the athletes who use it.
The Cedar Creek Sports Performance Center was designed to serve every athlete at the school from sixth through 12th grade while providing a topnotch training environment.
For Cedar Creek head football coach Jacob Angevine, the facility addresses one of the biggest challenges facing smaller schools.
“With us being a 1A school, some of these big-time 5A schools have these feeder schools,” Angevine said. “Well, man, we feed ourselves.”
That reality helped drive the vision behind the new sports performance center, a facility designed not only to serve the football program but every athletic team on campus.
“In order for us to have every single athlete come through here, we needed the space,” Angevine said.
The approximately 4,800-square-foot facility features 15 weight-training stations and an indoor turf area that allows athletes to complete strength, speed, agility and conditioning work under one roof.
The new facility represents a dramatic upgrade from Cedar Creek’s previous weight room, which featured only eight racks and limited room for athletes and coaches to work effectively.
“It’s night and day compared to what we had,” Angevine said. “Our old weight room had eight racks and a couple different machines, and it was a very tight-knit space where you really couldn’t do a whole lot. We had more kids bumping into each other, coaches bumping into each other.
“In this new facility, we can have a coach on each row watching five different racks at a time and coaching, plus we have other coaches over here on the turf coaching as well.”
Construction on the facility began in March 2025, with equipment arriving in phases over the past year before the final shipment of weights arrived this month.
That final shipment included roughly 13,000 pounds of weights, which were unloaded Monday morning with help from Cedar Creek middle school student-athletes.
“Shout out to our middle school girls,” Angevine said. “They unloaded all 13,000 pounds of weights off the truck. We had an assembly line going. It was awesome.”
The school worked with True Athletics to design a facility capable of maximizing the school’s budget while accommodating future growth. The goal was to create a space capable of handling as many as 60 football players at one time while still serving the needs of other athletic programs.
That versatility is already evident.
On a typical morning, multiple sports and training groups can be utilizing the facility simultaneously.
“This morning, we had girls basketball, softball, girls powerlifting … and two girls recovering from injury, all going at the same time, plus the middle school boys getting their speed work done on that side,” Angevine said.
The facility operates on a rotating schedule, with groups cycling through every 45 minutes, according to Angevine. Athletes begin with speed, agility and plyometric work before moving into strength training sessions.
The facility allows Cedar Creek students to establish consistent training habits long before athletes reach the varsity level.
While the physical benefits of the facility are obvious, Cedar Creek girls basketball coach Katie Hall said it’s just one more step the school is taking in upgrading it’s athletic programs and facilities.
“It’s just continuing to take steps in a direction that has growth and commitment to all of our athletes,” Hall said.
Hall said the shared training environment has helped strengthen relationships among athletes from different sports.
“It’s been really cool to see the camaraderie between all the sports,” Hall said. “We’re in there kind of overlapping each other and caring for each other, and it’s just kind of cool to see that aspect that I did not anticipate.”
The facility also allows Cedar Creek to keep more of its athletic development on campus.
For years, several programs utilized outside training resources, including workouts at 10 Ten Training. While those relationships remain valuable, Hall said having a first-class facility on campus gives student-athletes greater access to the school’s own coaches and training staff.
“We have some amazing coaches who are more than qualified to train all of our athletes,” Hall said. “We love our partnership with 10 Ten, but we also are very glad to just stay on campus and in-house and utilize these great coaches.”
For Cedar Creek, the sports performance center is more than a place to lift weights. It is a facility designed to serve every athlete, every sport and every stage of development from middle school through high school.
And while the building’s equipment and turf may be what visitors notice first, Hall believes the relationships being built inside it could prove just as valuable.
“It’s been really cool to see the camaraderie between all the sports,” Hall said. “We’re in there kind of overlapping each other and caring for each other, and it’s just kind of cool to see that aspect that I did not anticipate.”
