With all due respect to Allen Iverson, Isaiah Vargas wanted to talk about practice.
Vargas is an honor roll student, a team captain, and a two-way lineman for the Executive Education football team.
He was chosen to represent the team at a ceremony on Thursday morning commemorating the groundbreaking for the school’s new football stadium in the parking lot behind the school, even though ground was broken a few weeks ago after the end of the Lehigh Valley IronPigs baseball season. The location is shared by the IronPigs and Executive.
While the 4,000-seat stadium will be state-of-the-art and one of just a handful of stadiums of its kind in the country, with the field on a deck above a parking lot, Vargas is just happy he’ll have a great place for practice.
Executive Education student Isiah Vargas speaks during a groundbreaking ceremony Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025, for Executive Education Academy’s new stadium in Allentown. (Amy Shortell/The Morning Call)
“Every day we come outside for practice and walk down a trail, and then down the steps, and go down more steps, to get to a 50-yard mound of grass where we practice,” Vargas said. “So having a new stadium for practice really is exciting and means a lot to me. It’ll be my senior year, and I look forward to having our Senior Night on that field. It will be special.”
Executive football, which is in its fifth year of existence, has primarily used Muhlenberg College as its home field for games since its inception.
The football stadium will come just a few years after a state-of-the-art fieldhouse was dedicated at the charter school in East Allentown, and like the fieldhouse, the stadium was always in the plans of CEO and founder Bob Lysek, even though the location was not.
Lysek did a “who, what, when, where, why, and how” presentation at the ceremony as a construction crew worked behind him.
The what part detailed the stadium, which will feature a turf surface suitable for soccer and football. In addition to the field, there will be space for a concession stand, two locker rooms, two bathrooms, a press box, a scoreboard, and a storage unit. Underneath, there will be a parking lot for 305 spaces.
Why?
“Because our students deserve the very best,” Lysek said. “We want to provide them a first-class opportunity and for them to have the same type of facilities that a more affluent, wealthier school district would have. And remember, we don’t have outdoor space for gym classes here. The recess area for the elementary school is in the parking lot behind us. There are a lot of scrapes and scratches that occur on asphalt, so this turf field will also provide a recess area as well as gym classes for all three of our schools — elementary, middle school, and high school — and it will be home to our teams playing PIAA sports.”
Lysek said there was an extra story behind the where part of the equation.
“We were not going to do it here; we had a piece of property on the west side of the building we were going to use,” he said. “We bought the land on the west side with the intention of building the stadium on the Union Boulevard/Dauphin Street side of the property. We thought at the time the city would give us the sliver of land that was between the two pieces of the property we owned so we could build the stadium.
“That did not work out the way we wanted it to because there’s a roadway coming through here. But while that was happening, we were doing our bond issue and securing our finances, so we had to proceed forward. So we did some brainstorming and that’s where we came up with the idea of doing a deck and putting the stadium on top of the deck.”
Back in the spring, the IronPigs had expressed concerns about construction going on while the baseball season was going on. The IronPigs were given rights to the parking lot through a 2006 easement agreement with Agere Systems, the former occupant of Executive Education’s building.
But Executive and the IronPigs were able to come to an agreement.
“Without the IronPigs organization, owners Craig Finley and Joe Stein, we could not do this,” Lysek said. “Those two, along with general manager Kurt Landes, worked hand in hand with us to pull this off.
“There’s a lifetime easement attached to this property between the county and the IronPigs, and it is a bit complicated, but to simplify it, the IronPigs have the parking rights. We have to abide by that at all times.
“That’s why we came up with the deck idea, because we don’t want to take away parking spaces. We want the IronPigs to have the same amount of parking they have right now. That was very positive to be able to work with the IronPigs organization and Lehigh County to pull it off. And without the City of Allentown, without Mayor [Matt] Tuerk and Vicky Kistler [the city’s director of community and economic development], we could have never pulled this off because there is a strict timeline to make this happen. It’s so important that all of these partners worked together to make this happen once we got the approvals.”
As for the timeline. Lysek said: “We have obviously broken ground, and this decking needs to be done by the start of the next baseball season, which is the end of March. The decking must be done so the IronPigs baseball operations can go on as normal prior to construction. Once that is done, we can work up top while baseball can continue with no issues. The whole project is expected to be done by early fall next year so we hope to have a couple of games here next year.”
Of course, the No. 1 question on most people’s minds was and will be: How will the stadium, which Lysek said would cost $25 million, be paid for?
“The timing around the financing was at the forefront,” Lysek said. “With rates being down and us being in good financial standing, we were able to refinance our bonds that already existed with a better interest rate. We’re fiscally responsible, and we were able to pull it off with the timing being paramount to this process, along with everything else.”
In interviews after the ceremony, Lysek talked more about who is paying for the project.
“We are so unique and so different because we are a landlord with our foundation,” Lysek said. “At the early part of our charter, a very smart man, a financial adviser, told us about this pathway we’re currently going down. We were able to buy this building because we have 10 tenants in here that we get revenue from. So with that revenue and the school size, we were able to get a fairly large bond, and the bond covered the other jobs we’ve done over the years, and the bond will cover the stadium. We are refinancing our existing bonds that we did for the fieldhouse and the gym, and we’re getting it at a lower interest rate because of our outstanding credit rating.”
Lysek added that: “People are going to want to know if this is taxpayer money. We’re not costing taxpayers any more money by doing this project, which is hard to explain because we have a unique setup with our foundation being a landlord. It has been vetted and challenged many, many times, but it’s a legal way to operate and a legal entity we created to do this. Our foundation owns the property. The foundation gets money through our tenants. The charter school is actually one of the tenants that pays the foundation rent.”
Meanwhile, the current Executive football team is 5-3 after receiving a forfeit win over New Hope-Solebury. The Raptors, who are coached by former Bethlehem Catholic and Northampton coach Kyle Haas, will play their final game of the regular season at the Academy of the New Church in Philadelphia on Oct. 25.
Originally Published: October 17, 2025 at 6:00 AM EDT