Beaver Stadium will host a movie night and a yoga class this summer as Penn State continues to open the stadium for more and more non-football events.
NamaStadium, a 300-person, 18-and-older yoga class, will take place at 9 a.m. on Saturday, July 15, while on Saturday, July 22, the stadium will host 1,000 people at 8 p.m. for a Films on The Field series featuring “The Lion King” shown on the stadium scoreboard. Tickets for these events go on sale in June and details will be announced at a later date.
“We’re not going into this thinking about [using Beaver Stadium] seven days a year. We’re going into it thinking 12 months,” Penn State Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Pat Kraft said earlier this year.
Penn State Athletics has long grappled with the year-round use of Beaver Stadium even prior to Kraft’s arrival on campus. Previously in 2017 Beaver Stadium hosted a country music concert called Happy Valley Jam featuring Blake Shelton and Big and Rich, among others. The stadium has been the centerpiece for a handful of charity events, as well as the end point of the annual Paterno Family Run for Special Olympics Pennsylvania and the upcoming Ironman 70.3 Pennsylvania Happy Valley, but has effectively never been a space regularly used beyond the scope of football season.
Currently Penn State finds itself in the opening planning stages of a $700 million project to renovate Beaver Stadium with the primary focus of said project centered around the west side of the stadium. The project also features the winterization of Beaver Stadium which would allow for more events in the year’s colder months. Beaver Stadium’s inability to host winter events has long been one of the major hold-ups in the stadium hosting the National Hockey League’s Winter Classic series. It remains to be seen if these pending renovations would change that tune – housing, parking and other logistical hurdles have long been cited as other reasons that Beaver Stadium has yet to host the event.
“There’s a lot [that will change]; it’s not just the west side,” Kraft said. “The west side is going to become the heart of the building, and right now that heart is scattered all over the place. We will have expanded concourses, better circulation, which is a major issue, more points of sale, functioning bathrooms, and all that will go throughout the building. In most buildings, the west side is your heart, and that’s where we’re going to go with it.”
