Exclusive: Inside Northwestern's new football stadium for 2024-25
Step into the Lanny and Sharon Martin Lakeside Facility, as The Inside Zone gets a first look at the Wildcats' new home field for five football games this fall.
EVANSTON, Ill. — The first thing you realize as you step foot into Northwestern’s temporary lakeside football facility is that nothing about it screams “temporary.”
Sure, there are construction crews all over, and hard hats are required to enter, but this project is a lot more complicated than simply rolling in thousands of bleacher seats to bracket an already existing practice field.
“It's just a complete team effort all around the university starting at the top with the president's office, working its way down to our chief operating officer Luke Figora, who has sort of taken the lead rallying everybody together,” said Jesse Marks, Northwestern’s deputy athletic director, who has overseen the facility development. “A project of this scope in such a compact timeframe — which pretty much kicked off in earnest around April 1 — doesn't happen on a college campus without the help of many different units. So a lot of work, a lot of collaboration across different units have made this possible and got it up in record time.”
The Inside Zone received an early tour Tuesday of the stadium, which will host five Northwestern home football games beginning with the Wildcats’ Aug. 31 contest against Miami-Ohio. (Northwestern’s men’s and women’s soccer teams will officially kick things off at the Lanny and Sharon Martin Lakeside Facility with an Aug. 22 doubleheader against Marquette and Green Bay, respectively.)
Of note during this tour: It was an unusually cold and rainy Midwestern summer day. In other words, it was perfect weather for a Big Ten football game.
Let’s take a look inside, starting from the West side and working our way around from South to East. (Construction crews were working on the North side during the tour, so we were not allowed in that section of bleachers.)