GAME

Academic Integration and Competitive Excellence in Division I Athletics
Welcome TO HISTORIc HARVARD Stadium
harvard Football News 2016
When it was built, there were doubters who thought it would never
withstand the weight of a large crowd, let alone the brutal cold of a
New England winter.
But more than a century later it still stands proud, the “aristocrat of
American sports amphitheaters” as one writer put it, and is celebrated
for saving football as well as for its timeless charm and fabulous
sightlines for fans.
Harvard Stadium turns 113 years old this fall, and the nation’s
oldest permanent concrete structure for intercollegiate athletics has
never looked better. First opened Nov. 14, 1903, for a game against
Dartmouth, the Stadium has since hosted nearly 700 Harvard football
contests as well as hundreds of other athletic and non-athletic events,
including Olympic and professional soccer, lacrosse, rock concerts,
benefits and political rallies.
In March of 1903, it was announced that the Class of 1879, in honor
of its 25th anniversary, would present the university with a stadium
seating 40,000 spectators. The plans provided for a horseshoe-shaped
structure of steel, similar to the stadium at Athens, with seats of stone
and concrete for 27,000 persons. An additional 15,000 temporary
seats were to be added whenever the demand made it necessary. Its
total cost was $310,000.
It would be a much-needed addition to the Harvard athletics
landscape. The football and baseball teams had played for several
years at Soldiers Field, where fans jammed into decaying, unsafe
wooden bleachers to cheer on the Crimson. Work on the Stadium
began shortly after the completion of the 1903 baseball season, and
the foundations were dug in early July. Even when the Stadium opened
some four-and-a-half months later, it was far from a finished product.
Much of the seating on its eastern side was of a temporary wood
nature and capacity stood at just 20,000.
The Stadium marked the first use of reinforced concrete on a large
scale, and skeptics abounded who were certain the building would not
be safe. To allay those fears, the construction superintendent walked
beneath the stands while spectators took their seats on opening day.
In those days, football was a running and kicking game. But as the
sport became increasingly violent, some colleges were dropping
it in favor of rugby, so in 1906 U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt
1880 stepped in to save the game. He organized the Intercollegiate
Football Conference — a collection of 28 colleges and universities and
the forerunner of the NCAA — and demanded it adopt rules changes
to make the sport safer. Some suggested widening the field, but the
permanent nature of the stands at Harvard Stadium made it impractical
for the school to endorse this plan.
Concerned that eliminating football at Harvard might mean the
end of the sport on a national level, the committee instead approved
the forward pass, though it did its best to minimize its effect on the
sport. In 1906, the penalty for an incomplete was for the offensive
team to lose possession (the rule was “softened” in 1907 to a loss of 15
yards). Other rules changes were also implemented, including giving
the offense just three downs instead of five to gain a first down and
shortening games from 70 to 60 minutes with a mandatory 10-minute
rest between halves. In hindsight, however, it was the adoption of the
forward pass that curtailed the sport’s violence and led to the surge in
popularity that remains to this day.
The Stadium colonnade was added in 1910, and the press box was
also built to accommodate growing media interest. When the press
box burned down in 1981, it was rebuilt at a cost of $375,000, more
than the price tag for the entire Stadium some 80 years earlier. The
Stadium’s seating area was refurbished two years later.
Today, Harvard Stadium remains one of the great venues in all of
organized football. Sports fans from across the nation visit the Stadium
to experience the rich tradition, and Harvard’s student-athletes are
quick to talk about the unique experience of playing in one of the
sport’s true treasures.
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