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At Dillon High School in Texas, the fictional setting of television’s “Friday Night Lights,” the school's principal has spent four episodes of this season wrestling with the gap between funding for academics and athletics. At a time when her school can’t afford textbooks, football boosters are planning to buy a new big screen scoreboard.

It’s not too far from the real world, where the challenges of funding stadium renovations grow increasingly complex. At White Plains (N.Y.) High School, administrators plan to pay for their newly renovated $5 million stadium and $100,000 scoreboard with increased revenues from field rentals. At West Virginia’s Wheeling Park High School, which unveiled its $200,000 scoreboard this summer, the athletic department plans to recoup its investment with five-year advertising contracts.

Along with contributions from several anonymous donors, Gaffney (S.C.) High School’s new $9 million football stadium was largely funded by four local businesses, including a bank, construction company, and utility provider. The stadium, which is named The Reservation, includes a $500,000 electronic scoreboard that gives Gaffney the ability to broadcast its own games.

At the opening ceremonies in August, fans looked up to the scoreboard and watched previously recorded video footage of the school’s Indian mascot arriving at the old field to dig up a football from underneath the sod. The mascot then paid homage to the program’s multiple championships with a blood-curdling scream. From there, the video switched to live action as a helicopter brought the Indian to midfield at the new stadium, where he sprinkled dust from their former field and raised the game ball high over his head—to the cheers of 8,000 spectators. One month later, The Reservation reached a nationwide audience through Fox Sports Net, which televised Gaffney's home game against archrival James F. Byrnes High School—which has a $320,000 scoreboard of its own.

As the technology becomes more accessible, the phenomenon continues to spread. Earlier this fall, Barrington High School, located in a suburb northwest of Chicago, became the first high school program in the state to use a big screen scoreboard, which was launched as part of the school’s new $4.4 million stadium. With a $143,000 price tag, the scoreboard enables Barrington to highlight its games with player profiles, pregame videos, and instant replays.

Barrington athletes love seeing themselves on the big screen.

"You feel like you’re a real professional football player," senior Cam Good told the Chicago Tribune. "You score a touchdown and you look up and there you are, and there are 1,000 screaming fans."

At the same time, the modern scoreboard provides students in the school’s video classes a display canvas they wouldn’t find anywhere else. Over the summer, Barrington students spent hundreds of hours shooting profiles of each of the team’s 90 players.

Upcoming plans call for a similar focus on the lacrosse, soccer, and track teams, and though the school currently has the capability of broadcasting an entire game, athletic administrators are moving cautiously.

"We’re starting out pretty slow," Athletic Director Mike Obsuszt told the Tribune. "If you're doing crowd shots, you're hoping it shows the people in the crowd doing appropriate things."

Barrington’s experience is echoed at Lakeland (Fla.) High School, which has been featuring its $400,000 scoreboard during Dreadnaught football games.

"It has provided an excellent vehicle, because it provides workforce education skills," Pam Baker, Career Coordinator for Lakeland’s Academy of Art, Design, and Technology, told LHS's Naughty News. "What I find is neat is that a group of students has really made it theirs.

"I seriously doubt any of these kids will go on to become professional jumbotron operators,” she continued. "But all of my students will go off to some career, even if it's being a stay-at-home parent … and I think they will truly appreciate this opportunity to learn on the job."

The scoreboard has become the centerpiece of Lakeland’s technology program, and with training, students learn to set up and test equipment, run cables, review tape, edit highlights, create weekly packages, and prepare commercials.

"You learn a lot if you want to be in the field of communications when you grow up," sophomore Laury Sanchez told the Naughty News. "It really teaches you a lot of things, not only to work with people, but to work with a lot of equipment."

With one of the premier high school football programs in the country, Lakeland’s booster club was able to find a dozen people to co-sign the note for the scoreboard. The price tag on an electronic scoreboard is still too daunting for many schools, but as the technology becomes more affordable, others will undoubtedly follow.

By now, big screen scoreboards have become an expected part of the college football experience, which is why students at the University of Mississippi are trying to push the technology even further: They want their stadium’s $6 million, 48-by-84-foot scoreboard to go green.

“I think it’s definitely important for us to explore opportunities that will offset some of the energy use on that HD scoreboard with solar power,” Ole Miss Sustainability Coordinator Jim Morrison the Daily Mississippian. “We are going to be working closer with the athletic department as we move forward. We’re going to evaluate our operations and say, ‘Hey, is there a better way that we can do this more efficiently?’”

Kenny Berkowitz is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management.