We touched on Old Dominion's plans to build a new stadium recently, but on Thursday the school unveiled official plans for the program's future.
As speculated in the past, the new stadium will be built on top of the current one -- soon to be 80-year-old Foreman Field -- and because of that will retain the name, Foreman Field at S.B. Ballard Stadium. With a projected open date of 2019, the new stadium will hold 22,130 seats at a cost of $55 million and, in a possibly precedent-setting wrinkle, will not include any student fees in the funding -- sort of. A new student fee will not be added to fund the stadium, and instead the school will repurpose existing student fees to get the facility built.
Due to state budget cuts, ODU has been under pressure to reduce its reliance on student fees and because of that a $94 million option that would have leaned heavily on new fees was deemed "unacceptable" by school COO David Harnage.
The 22,130-seat capacity was a bit of a head-scratcher for many observers, representing just a 2,000-seat bump from the Monarchs' current home and especially since the team has sold out every game since moving up to FBS. ODU's new home will be the fourth-smallest in Conference USA and smaller than James Madison's and Norfolk State's homes. "Officials from Populous Architects said that although their surveys of fans indicated ticket demand would surge to 25,500, the national average for other stadiums indicate that 22,000 would be the likely real ticket demand," writes the Virginian-Pilot. The new Foreman Field will also be expandable to 30,000 upon demand.
The school supplied a couple renderings, courtesy of the Virginian-Pilot. Hopefully we get some more soon.
And how it would look at 30,000 seats.
