Charlotte 49ers AD shares plans for funding, timetable of football stadium expansion
Charlotte will soon be expanding its on-campus football stadium and will begin construction as soon as the university has the funding in place.
The school will not, 49ers athletic director Mike Hill told The Charlotte Observer, pass any of the costs of the $102 million athletic-facility expansion onto students in the form of fees.
The Charlotte 49ers unveiled their EverGreen Athletic Facilities Master Vision on Tuesday, providing a detailed look at the expansion of Jerry Richardson Stadium, among many other renovations, as part of a multimillion-dollar plan.
The plan detailed a 12-15-year road map for the 49ers’ athletics program, which will be split into multiple phases based on the university’s fundraising approach, the first of which includes expanding Jerry Richardson Stadium.
Richardson Stadium’s expansion, along with new baseball and softball clubhouses, renovated locker rooms for men’s and women’s basketball, and a new stadium for men’s and women’s soccer and women’s lacrosse —the school’s newest athletic program — are all prioritized in Phase I of the project, totaling $102 million.
Upgrading facilities has become a priority for the university since it accepted an invitation to leave Conference USA for the American Athletic Conference last year. Charlotte will reportedly begin play in the AAC in 2023-24.
“Our focus is on private fundraising. It is not a student-fee-based project,” Hill said. “If we get to 30,000 seats (at Richardson Stadium), the projected costs for that today are just north of $81 million. The goal is to get to 30,000. Whether it’s 21,000 seats and then 30,000 seats, or just straight to 30,000 — which is our target right now.
“You’re looking at approximately a two-and-a-half-year process to design and expand the stadium, but that would commence once we have the funding in place,” Hill continued. “It’s contingent on raising a significant amount of capital.”
Richardson Stadium is the smallest stadium in the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision with 15,300 seats.
Hill said that the stadium had to be expanded, but it was imperative that the university ramped up its fundraising to elevate its athletics programs.
The master vision for the stadium is broken into multiple phases:
Phase 1: The addition of suites, loge boxes, club seats, a new hospitality space, as well as a new press box for broadcasting and media members. There will be 2,062 general admission seats and 1,050 premium seats added for a total of 18,426 seats. The $1 million locker room renovation that was completed in 2020 was a part of Phase I.
Phase 1A: The addition of an upper deck at Richardson Stadium will bring 2,754 seats, increasing capacity to 21,180 seats.
Phase 2: An entire upper bowl will be added, increasing the stadium’s capacity by 9,500 to eclipse 30,000 seats.
Hill said there is a third phase to the stadium expansion that would add an additional 15,000 seats, totaling over 45,000 seats at Richardson Stadium —but that is for the future leadership of the university to handle. “It is not a part of the immediate future, but to demonstrate the expansion capabilities in the future,” he said.
As far as potentially playing games at Bank of America Stadium during stadium renovations, which was discussed when the 49ers submitted their bid to the American, Charlotte hasn’t had any further conversations with the Carolina Panthers.
“We would certainly re-engage with the Panthers and that organization to discuss some options if we needed to vacate our stadium until the renovations were complete,” Hill said. “It could be potentially done in phases where a part of a season, or a full season would be unavailable to us. We’ve not had those specific conversations since our broader discussion when we were looking to gain admission to the American.”
Future phases for the 19 athletics programs on campus include expanding the Robert & Mariam Hayes Baseball Stadium and the Sue M. Daughtridge Softball Stadium, building a basketball practice facility and making enhancements to Halton Arena, a new Wells Fargo Fieldhouse for soccer and lacrosse, a Halton-Wagner Tennis complex indoor facility and a student-athlete enhancement center.
There is a 97,000 square foot indoor practice facility in the works for the football program, but that will come after the stadium’s expansion.
“All of these projects are priorities. We’re trying to accelerate the growth of this program in a short amount of time, compared with what other programs have had to do over decades,” Hill said. “You can’t do it all at once because it’s significant capital. But I think the indoor (practice) facility, we would love to get it done for football and it’s our intention to get it done as soon as possible. Phase I right now is our focus, and that’s the stadium.”
This story was originally published May 26, 2022 at 6:00 AM.