Inside Northwestern's plan for a 15,000-seat home stadium

EVANSTON, Ill. — Northwestern football coach David Braun has made bold calls late in games, but they usually come on a sideline somewhere, not across the dinner table from his wife, Kristin.

Yet there they were this spring, enjoying a rare night out around Braun’s 39th birthday, engaged in a conversation they never could have envisioned a year earlier. Braun, who had not worked at a major conference school until 2023, is the reigning Big Ten Coach of the Year. Last year, he led Northwestern through one of the rockiest stretches in program history, securing the permanent coaching job and the financial rewards that came with it.

Uncertainty lurked, though. Northwestern had not finalized plans for where to play its home games in 2024 and 2025, during the $800 million rebuild of Ryan Field. The area offered limited venue options, none particularly good and all that would remove the team from campus and its comforts.

An alternative had emerged, broached years earlier by former coach Pat Fitzgerald, but gaining traction as the clock ticked toward the 2024 opener against Miami (Ohio). A gimmick play of sorts, perhaps even a Hail Mary. The concept would draw some chuckles, but at Northwestern, it might just work.

The school would build a temporary structure around its on-campus soccer/lacrosse stadium, using an outdoor football practice field and a parking lot as the site for the primary grandstands. Capacity would be only about 15,000, minuscule for a league where several teams regularly play in front of six-figure crowds.

Braun loved the idea for several reasons, but needed to get it across the goal line.

“We’re talking through this, and to Kristin’s credit, she’s like, ‘We’re passionate about this. What can we do?'” Braun said. “I said, ‘Let’s put our money where our mouth is and see if we can truly help.’ A lot of wives may have resisted something like that, and Kristin was like, ‘Hell yeah, let’s go do this.'”

Boosted by “a major six-figure commitment” from the Brauns, the university green-lit the temporary stadium in early April. The Wildcats will play most of their 2024 and 2025 home games, including several Big Ten contests, at the revamped facility, just yards from the shores of Lake Michigan. The team will play its first five home contests, including Indiana and Wisconsin, at the temporary stadium, before finishing with Ohio State and Illinois at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

The lakefront wasn’t Northwestern’s first choice. The site brings challenges beyond the small footprint, and stretches the imagination of all who will use it. But Braun and others are confident the quirky setup is just what the program needs.

“It’s going to be unique, it’s going to be imperfect, but it’s ours,” Braun said. “It prioritizes our student-athletes and our students and our campus community. That’s what’s most important.”

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IN SEPTEMBER 2022, Northwestern announced its long-awaited plan to rebuild Ryan Field, a charming but rapidly aging structure that lacked modern amenities. Although the school didn’t get final approval to begin construction for 14 more months, the football team knew it would be displaced.

The problem was finding other places to play. Northwestern has partnered with Wrigley Field for events since 2013, but couldn’t schedule games there until November, after the World Series. The same was the case for Guaranteed Rate Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, on the city’s South Side. Soldier Field is set up for football and has hosted college games before — Northwestern faced Illinois there in 2015 — but has limited availability. Not only would Northwestern need to navigate the Bears’ schedule, but the Chicago Fire, the city’s MLS team, returned to Soldier Field in 2020 and has dates blocked out for both games and training. Sources said Northwestern would have had a hard time securing two Soldier Field dates for 2024.

Another option was SeatGeek Stadium, the Fire’s former home, near Midway Airport in south suburban Bridgeview. Availability wouldn’t be an issue at the 28,000-seat facility, but its location — 30 miles away from Northwestern’s campus, through or around Chicago and its often-awful traffic — created some challenges.

In addition to Chicago-area venues, Northwestern had engaged with the Green Bay Packers about moving a few home games to Lambeau Field, according to sources. (Packers president/CEO Mark Murphy is the former athletic director at Northwestern.) But when the prospect of “hosting” Wisconsin at Lambeau this fall was broached to some donors, the backlash came swiftly.

Not coincidentally, talks around the temporary campus stadium intensified around the same time.

“It really just started with a conversation of: Have we fully explored an option here on the lake?” Braun said.

Braun huddled with deputy athletic director Jesse Marks, a strong advocate for the temporary stadium. They consulted with the university, the city of Evanston, the Big Ten and the other impacted coaches at Northwestern.

“We sort of put our heads together and said: How do we make this work?” Marks said.

Marks oversees development and deals with Northwestern’s top donors. As executive director of the Miami Dolphins Foundation before Northwestern, he also had seen how spaces could be transformed to host events, as the Miami Open tennis tournament was moved inside Hard Rock Stadium.

Although the cost of Northwestern’s temporary stadium doesn’t come close to the Ryan Field rebuild or register as a major university facilities project, the endeavor is still “really expensive,” Marks said, declining to be more specific. But the pitch to donors wasn’t difficult, especially when they learned about Braun’s contribution.

Key selling points included how the stadium would impact athletes on game days, as well as the campus, which has been through a turbulent year, beginning with the hazing scandal that led to Fitzgerald’s firing and dozens of lawsuits against the school, and continuing with protests around the Israel-Gaza conflict.

“It’s easy for me to say our student-athletes are going to be able to finish their games, go into their locker room 100 feet away, and go out and join their parents instantaneously instead of three hours later,” Marks said. “And then the other side is it’s not just athletics. This is going to connect the whole campus. We need more of that right now.”

Before Northwestern, Braun spent years playing and coaching in smaller college venues, including the Fargodome at North Dakota State, where he helped the Bison win two FCS national titles.

“A very small venue, compared to your typical Big Ten venue, but Fargo was one of the toughest places to play in all of college football,” Braun said. “My hope is that with a bunch of purple and a bunch of students that are vibrant, on campus and walking over for games, we can create a huge home-field advantage.”

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THE LOGISTICS OF moving major football to a small area in the corner of campus seemed daunting. But so far at Northwestern, many of the hurdles have been cleared.

Start with parking. Ryan Field is about a mile west of campus, wedged into a residential neighborhood. But Northwestern actually has more parking spots spread around its campus than are in the two major stadium lots. Plus, the temporary stadium must accommodate only about one-third of the fans (Ryan Field held 47,130). Although the only route to the stadium is a two-lane campus access road, there will be space for emergency vehicles, Marks said, even underneath the north grandstand.

The temporary field, officially Lanny and Sharon Martin Stadium, will feature nearly double the amount of premium seating area as Ryan Field did, and 16 semi-private suites, which will help offset the revenue loss of the much smaller venue. Situated on a large lakefill that hosted ESPN’s College GameDay in 2013, the area can accommodate a tailgate village and different spaces to rent, right beside the lake.

The stadium design is distinct with most seating behind the end zones, since the east sideline flanks the lake and Northwestern plays field hockey just to the west (the current lacrosse/soccer stadium has permanent seating for only 2,000).

Northwestern selected InProduction, which constructs temporary seating and venues for a range of events, to design and build the temporary venue. InProduction’s sports portfolio includes structures at Formula 1 races, soccer fields and golf tournaments, including the massive stadium around the 16th hole at the Waste Management Open in Arizona. They have also done college football projects at Hawai’i, Appalachian State and elsewhere.

“We work in pretty tight spots all the time,” said Jason Tedrow, InProduction’s president and CEO. “We build a 20,000-seat stadium around a par-3 every year, so that’s the kind of stuff we’re used to doing. What made this unique is the site, it’s so cool, where it’s at and how it’s situated. We’ve had to get really creative with the different types of structures, so we can provide different levels of experience.”

The design includes bleacher seating in the north grandstands, which will include the student section and band, and ledge seating above the existing seat structure on the west side, which will also be used to view field hockey games. The south grandstands are the most detailed, and will house two levels of suites (semi-private and club), field-level tables with barstools steps from the playing area, and offer all-inclusive food and beverage options. Small banks of bleachers will line the east sideline, behind the visitors bench and a few yards from the lake.

Elements of Northwestern’s design mirror other InProduction projects. The south end resembles setups for high-end golf tournaments, while the north grandstand is similar to the look for F1 races. The press box area above the west bleachers looks a lot like the temporary on-campus stadium at Hawai’i, which opened in 2021 and has increased capacity.

The stadium’s hallmark is its location, with a lakefront view of the Chicago skyline on clear days. Construction began in early June, and Tedrow has targeted mid-August to finish.

“We’re building around a lakefront in the middle of summer in Chicago,” he said. “We do a lot of work on golf courses, a lot of work around races and racetracks and parking lots and things like that, so it’s going to be a beautiful spot to work. It’s a full stadium, a full build from the ground up, and then we’ll take everything down and it’ll be like we were never there.”

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FOR MOST MAJOR conference teams, the prospect of vacating their home stadium, even with a better one on the way, is scary. Moving to a venue smaller than some high school stadiums would be a nonstarter, especially for two seasons.

As the smallest school and one of only two private schools in the Big Ten (USC is the other), Northwestern has a different profile than its competitors. The idea of home-field advantage doesn’t resonate as much. Games at Ryan Field often featured large contingents of opposing fans, especially with so many Big Ten alumni in the Chicago area.

The temporary stadium could provide Northwestern with elements it has never enjoyed, and at a critical time.

“It’s so uniquely ours,” Braun said. “In a lot of ways, it’s very fitting to who we are. I don’t know if this works at any other Big Ten institution.”

Braun has been on campus for only 18 months but has seen a lot. He took over last July after the abrupt and controversial firing of Fitzgerald, Northwestern’s all-time winningest coach and one of the team’s most decorated ex-players. Despite the jarring change and with the lowest of expectations — Northwestern had gone 1-11 in 2022 — Braun’s team won eight games, including the Las Vegas Bowl, and regained some stability.

But maintaining the trajectory would be difficult, especially in an expanded Big Ten and without a primary stadium.

“The thing that we’ve all talked about at length is bridging the gap,” Braun said. “The momentum that we carry over these next two seasons will directly impact the experience that we’re able to create in the new Ryan Field.”

Braun also has seen the potential of a home-crowd advantage at Northwestern by attending men’s basketball games at Welsh-Ryan Arena the past two seasons. Northwestern has beaten top-ranked Purdue and Illinois in consecutive seasons and last season went 15-2 at Welsh-Ryan, a small but raucous venue that the school can actually fill with its own fans.

But after Northwestern’s first NCAA tournament appearance in 2017, the team had to vacate Welsh-Ryan during a major renovation, and ended up playing the 2017-18 season about 40 minutes from campus at Allstate Arena, near O’Hare Airport. Despite returning a preseason top-20 team, Northwestern went 15-17, the first of five straight losing seasons.

“When the basketball team was off campus, that took a hit,” Braun said. “I wasn’t there for it, but I feel like it took the air out of the sails of the program and the momentum.”

The temporary stadium plan has generated skepticism, even at first from Northwestern players. But as they saw images of what the facility would look like, they quickly warmed to it. Players will use the same locker room and other areas of their practice facility on game days. Most of Northwestern’s game-day recruiting events will now remain on campus.

Northwestern began its pre-sale for season-ticket holders June 10 and quickly reported more revenue — with renewals still ongoing — than it generated for the 2023 season. Although the school has struggled to fill Ryan Field, its fans typically travel well for bowl games and other novelty opportunities. They’re also targeting more student engagement with a stadium located not far from residence halls, although the first few games will happen before classes begin.

Visiting teams will maintain an allotment of tickets, set by the Big Ten office, and visiting fans will have areas to tailgate, Marks said. But they won’t have the same experience — or advantage — as they enjoyed at Ryan Field.

“If other fan bases have strong opinions about it, we’re not concerned,” Braun said. “At the end of the day, you want to create an environment that’s yours and that creates a home-field advantage and is something that’s really memorable.”