Stadium Spotlight: Atlanta Beat’s Special New Digs
Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) announced today that May 9th will mark the opening of the new, $17 million 8,300 capacity stadium being built for the expansion team the Atlanta Beat at Kennesaw State University, a remarkable construction achievement given the announcement that it was to be built was only made late last year, and the land cleared in December.
“We are excited to make this announcement,” said Atlanta Beat General Manager Shawn McGee. “The opening of the world’s first women’s soccer-specific stadium of this magnitude means a great deal to both soccer in the Southeast and to women’s sports on a national scale.”
It’s not the first stadium to be used primarily for women’s soccer (Florida State University’s Seminole Soccer Complex’s sole tenants are its women’s team; anyone know of others?), but this is still quite a special moment for fans of professional women’s soccer. It looks like it will be a fantastic venue for WPS, pretty much the perfect size for the league at this point. Here’s hoping it’s the first of many.
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All the major colleges in Texas (save for I think SMU) only field women’s teams, so those stadiums.
It looks like a great venue, and it’s Atlanta’s second soccer-specific stadium. That’s pretty cool.
Elizabeth Lyle Robbie at U of Minnesota is womens only
Thanks Bobby and wptspeed. I take it none of them are anywhere near the scale of this stadium in terms of capacity?
And interesting point about Atlanta, Bobby, with the Silverbacks’ soccer stadium there too — anyone know if the Beat were in serious negotiation to play there originally? One would presume so.
I don’t believe so, the Silverbacks field a women’s team as well (though I’m unsure if that’ll continue after their spat with the USL). The women’s team were actually the flag-bearers with the men’s side on the shelf.
Yea, the other stadiums are quite small. Thought the Aggie Soccer Stadium in College Station (Texas A&M) is expandable, and it hosted a Houston Dynamo CONCACAF Champions Cup tie once.
There is one exception, Mike A. Myers Stadium in Austin, where UT plays. UT doesn’t have a men’s team so the women’s team plays there, I don’t really want to include it though since it has a 9-lane track. Holds 20,000 people. The Aztex approached the University about renting it and were subsequently blown off.
Do you really want to go to a stadium that was built in six months?
Umm, why not KT? It’s not as if they’re attempting to build the Nou Camp in six months, it looks pretty straightforward from the rendering. If progress wasn’t on schedule they wouldn’t have announced the home opener today. In any case, I’ve certainly enjoyed going to much less nice looking stadiums….
We can’t really be selective at this point in the game’s development here anyway, as much as we’d all love a Red Bull Arena in our cities. Really all we want is a ground with a wide pitch were the game can be played freely as opposed to a pitch shoehorned into a narrow field.
This stadium is a joint venture with Kennesaw State, so it is hard to guage just how good it will be financially for the Beat. If they have cut a deal so that they can realise substantial non-football revenue from the facilities then they will be in excellent shape for an expansion team in a unproven professional sport.
My only concern with it is that it is so far from the centre of Atlanta. Everyone in Atlanta drives everywhere, but I wonder how successful the Beat will be drawing fans from suburbs on the other side of the metropolitan area. In my life I’ve only been to Kennesaw a couple times, and those were on grade school field trips.
Playing in the centre at a large, high-cost stadium would be a disaster, though. The Beat would get nothing other than gate revenues, and would probably pay over the odds for rent (and probably get no advance credit as they are a new team).
My guess, and it is only a guess, is that Kennesaw State provided the land in exchange for access for their women’s soccer theam (the Lady Owls), and that othewise the stadium belongs to the Beat. If that’s the case, then I think the Beat have pulled off a real coup.
Oh, and they are assembling an excellent squad as well.
That stadium is awesome and should be the future of soccer in the US. And look at the cost, $17M for 8,300 seats! Compare that to $110M for 20,000 seats at Rio Tinto in Salt Lake City or $131M for 18,000 seats at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Colorado. How much does that extra money improve the experience for fans? I’d rather sit in a more modest stadium and pay to see talent on the field but some leagues have a different model.
One more thing on this. My local team here in England is Bath City (who I blog about if you are interested). They play in an 9,000 seat ground. Having grown up going to Braves games at Atlanta Fulton County with its 50,000+ capacity I thought such a small ground would lack atmosphere. That’s not the case. I find Twerton Park, where Bath City play, as exciting a place to watch football as anywhere else. Because it doesn’t host any other sports the seats go right up to the pitch, and when it gets a few thousand people in it you feel like you are at a big match. It’s not the same as a few thousand rattling around a huge stadium.
So, an inexpensive 8,000 seater looks like the right way to go. Thank goodness the Beat aren’t falling into the trap that so many other new teams do and rent an expensive, huge ground.
Bobby is right about the soccer stadiums in Texas. TCU build this after they axed their Men’s Soccer team. http://gofrogs.cstv.com/facilities/tcu-facilities-soccer.html
It has 1,500 seats, but they hold many local youth team events there too.
I think not only men who can only perform especially in sports, as well as with its built this stadium it increasingly makes fiery spirit of the women.
Vanderbilt has a soccer specific field used only for a women’s team, but only because they killed their men’s team to add women’s swimming.