EVANSTON, Ill. — When there was just enough quiet Saturday — when somehow, in the middle of a major college football game, the whistles stopped, the music lowered and the sold-out crowd hushed — you could tune your ears to the background noise and hear waves crashing onto the shore of Lake Michigan.
Northwestern’s lakeside, temporary, 12,000-seat stadium is a delight like that. Why, then, given the glowing reviews from so many, would the Wildcats ever move?
The answer is straightforward, leaving no room for tension. Northwestern is already building an $800 million, 35,000-seat stadium on the old Ryan Field site, which is scheduled to open about a mile from campus in 2026. That project will be propped up by a $480 million donation from the Ryan family, the megadonors who also were behind the team’s state-of-the-art practice facility. School officials are giddy about the possibilities.
They just needed somewhere to host football games in the meantime. Turns out they made a guinea pig, too.
“We’re gathering data with the temporary site that we can use to influence our construction plans for the new stadium,” said Jesse Marks, the deputy athletic director considered the brains behind the lakeside stadium. For effect, he spoke in the Oceanside Suite, which is in the second deck and provides a view of everything. It also gets a perfect breeze.
Knowing the team would be displaced for two seasons, officials considered a few off-site options, including Wrigley Field in Chicago and even Lambeau Field in Wisconsin for a game. But Wrigley wasn’t available until after November, when it will host Northwestern’s final two home games. Lambeau, home of the Green Bay Packers, was too far away. To stay on campus, though, the school had to squint hard at the small space between its field hockey stadium and the lake. Imagination was a must.
Having worked for the Miami Dolphins, Marks thought about how a temporary tennis stadium was built inside Hard Rock Stadium for the Miami Open. Northwestern wound up calling the company that did that project. And that company, InProduction, wound up building the lakeside stadium in about two months. The field is where the Wildcats typically play soccer and lacrosse. The grandstands are where there used to be a parking lot on one end and an outdoor football practice field on the other. The bathrooms are portable, though some are those nicer trailers that you may have seen at weddings.
“We turned 1,200 seats into 12,000 seats. And, believe it or not, we have more premium seating here than we did at old Ryan Field,” Marks said. “That’s where the data has been really helpful. Maybe fans are super into the suites. Maybe they’re into the bar ledge seating we have on either side now. Maybe they’re clamoring for the tables we have behind the end zone down there. If we see a trend, we can add more of that in the new stadium. It’s a unique opportunity to get that feedback in real time.”
But, seriously, why not just stay? For a smaller private school that hasn’t had huge crowds in the past, isn’t there some pull to an intimate environment with a defining quirk? What about the lake view?
“You can’t compare the two,” Marks said, though of course he has seen the social media love for the lakeside site, which spiked either during its Week 1 debut or when a rabbit ran onto the field during the Duke game Sept. 6. “This is a great temporary stadium. The waterfront property always sells. But what we’re doing at new Ryan Field is going to set the standard for every college football program in America. That will be the nicest stadium in college football.”
“Venue sizes, if they do shrink, are shrinking because of experiential requirements,” said Sean Plunkett, principal of the sports division at architectural firm PBK. “Depending on where you are in the country, areas that have competing interests for fan attendance, the need for some of this variation of experience is higher and the need for seating counts may be lower.”
Northwestern certainly falls in that category. That’s why having 35,000 seats makes sense for the new Ryan Field. With about 12,000 fewer seats than the previous stadium, it will be the smallest football venue in the Big Ten by a good margin. By contrast, Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State can fit more than 100,000 people (and almost always do).
At the moment, the lure for Northwestern students is the lakeside stadium’s proximity to their dorms. Ninety minutes before kickoff Saturday, 40 of them were asked in a straw poll whether they would be attending the game if it were a mile down the road. Fifteen were an unequivocal yes. Ten were an unequivocal no. Fourteen were varying shades of undecided, though one did say he is “no doubt going to hit every lake game because it’s kind of like history, right?” The final student was a little too buzzed to engage with the question.
“We walk by it all the time, you know? It feels like we’re home,” said Charles Schaefer, a freshman from Milwaukee who was first in line for the student section. The gates opened and he started to move, shouting over his shoulder: “This is my first college football game. I think it’s going to be sick.”
“On campus, we’re competing for the students’ attention. In the community, we’re competing with the living room now, all these sight lines, the great TV angles,” said Mark Jackson, who became Northwestern’s athletic director in September after a decade at Villanova. “The trend, it feels like, is less is more, fewer seats and more premium, intimate experiences. We’re learning a lot.”
When Jackson arrived for an interview Saturday, he apologized for being a few minutes late, saying, “I’m still figuring out my geographies around here.” It was hard to blame him. Because the second-floor press box is so crammed, some reporters sit in Section L, which turned out to be the first row behind the south end zone. But most of the attendants, many of them no older than 18, didn’t know that. A teenager pointed to that older lady with the hat on. The older lady pointed to that guy with his hands on his hips. The guy with his hands on his hips pointed to that student-aged usher in a purple visor.
The student-aged usher in the purple visor shrugged.
“I don’t know, dude,” he said. “They, like, just built this thing.”
And in less than two seasons, they’ll tear it down. But the hope is that, instead of losing fans in the two years without a permanent home, the quirkiness will draw them in. Jackson already has seen it firsthand. He has three kids in college and a 17-year-old son. When he took the Northwestern job, that son was adamant about finishing high school in Philadelphia. Then on their first visit to Evanston together, right when they had stepped onto the patio of the practice facility, sunset hit Lake Michigan, bathing the stadium in blues and oranges.
“He’s my decision-maker on this whole move,” Jackson said. “I didn’t say anything, but I could see the look on his face. We got to dinner that night, and he goes: ‘You know, Dad, if you get me a nice house, I might be able to come here. It’s pretty nice.’ It was a little victory for the stadium.”
A few minutes before kickoff Saturday, few seemed ready to leave the fan zone on top of the used-to-be practice field. None of it was visible. In its place, there was a temporary rubber floor, a temporary beer garden and a temporary tent selling bite-size boneless wings, which might have been the most temporary item of all. And maybe that temporary feeling — of being in a small, specific bit of time in a small, specific bit of space — is what makes the lakeside stadium so charming, even if the bathrooms kind of smelled and beer could leak on your head if you walked under the student section. What’s life if not seeking the few moments that aren’t like the rest, when you don’t expect to hear crashing waves and then there they are?
At a football game, no less, in between the noise.
