When he entered office in 2022, Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp made improving public high school athletic facilities a major point of emphasis for his administration.
His vision has started to take form as new synthetic turf football fields were installed this summer at a trio of county schools — Howard, Ooltewah and Soddy Daisy — with the help of corporate sponsors such as Coca-Cola and U.S. Xpress, although hotel/motel taxes covered most of the expense at Howard.
“I am sensitive to the reality that our community has catered to private education with a lot of resources in our county flowing to those private schools,” Wamp said in a phone interview this week with the Times Free Press. “You have an arms race in athletic facilities not just between the juggernauts like Baylor and McCallie, but even at schools like Boyd Buchanan, CCS (Chattanooga Christian School) and Silverdale (Baptist Academy). They now have excellent facilities.
“In some parts of the county, we are falling well short of the standards that we ought to hold ourselves to in terms of the tools that we are giving our students and coaches to compete and succeed on the athletic field. One of those tools is turf.”
The 37-year-old Wamp wants to help level the playing field, with a goal of bringing synthetic turf to every public high school in Hamilton County.