Extra Points: Family Tree

Brian Davis grew up in the Midwest and ran track at Iowa State before launching a career as an academic advisor in college athletic departments. He landed a job in 1984 with the Carolina football program and motored into Chapel Hill one day in August looking for Kenan Stadium and the football fieldhouse.

"I drove around for half an hour and couldn't find a football stadium," Davis says. "I found a gas station at the bottom of Hwy. 54 and they told me where to go. I grew up in the flatlands where you see stadiums rise out of the ground and you can see them a mile away."

Lizzie Hill worked in game management and events planning at the University of South Carolina when the school in 2012 began making enhancements to the grounds outside Williams Brice Stadium, a venue long situated next to the State Fairgrounds and amidst acres of concrete parking lots and industrial complexes. One project included a new premium parking lot with a grassy promenade and dozens of trees imported and planted—taking the trouble to use only scarlet oaks that would turn to a garnet color in the fall rather than orange (Gamecocks over Tigers, get it?)

Now Hill's job is to create and manage distinctive gameday experiences at Carolina, and she is standing in the woods outside Kenan Stadium, motioning toward the nooks and crannies where this Saturday a DJ will be spinning tunes and select Tar Heel fans will be dining on hamburgers, coleslaw and macaroni and cheese.

"There's a different look and feel at UNC," she says. "You look around at all of these old trees. Chapel Hill has so much history and tradition. It feels old and nostalgic."

Sometimes the Carolina community takes for granted its unique setting for college football. Kenan Stadium opened in 1927 in a forest south of campus, and in the mid-1900s Tar Heel football players were known to hunt squirrels in the woods and give the carcasses to equipment manager Morris Mason.

The wooded envelope around the stadium has shrunk significantly over the years with a Campus Health Services building erected to the southwest in 1980, the George Watts Hill Alumni Center and Carolina Club to the northeast in 1993, and the Bell Tower Parking Deck to the west in 2010 and the Loudermilk Center to the east in 2011. All of that culling of the forest prompted UNC Athletic Department officials, the University's landscaping consultants and University arborist Thomas Bythell to take a careful and concentrated look at preserving and enhancing the remaining acreage.

"Kenan Stadium and surrounding Kenan Woods lay both physically and socially at the center of campus life," wrote landscape architect Peter Schaudt in his 2008 report The Dignity of Restraint, which outlined the Historic Landscape Framework Plan commissioned by the University. "The immediate wooded setting has and continues to distinguish this stadium apart from other collegiate sports stadiums."

Bythell has been in charge of a program over the last decade to fence off four sections in the woods on the north side where new trees have been planted, mulch laid down and no traffic of any kind is allowed. Bythell's staff grooms and cultivates the protected woods on a regular basis.

"This is a very unique setting," says Bythell. "I was told that Mr. Kenan purposely wanted the woods around it. You see the old, old photographs, and the woods were really deep. You'd walk a hundred yards through the woods before getting to the gate. Through the years, the university has grown and slowly encroached on that. It was important to Mr. Kenan that it be wooded all the way around. We're trying to honor that. It's very important and very unique."

This year University administrators and their game day management partners are venturing carefully into Kenan Woods with a new tailgating venue outside the northwest corner of the stadium to be called "Kenan Pines." For a ticket ranging from $35 to $50, fans will have access to an area with food, beverage, widescreen TVs, music and yard games beginning four hours prior to kickoff and lasting through the end of the third quarter. Also newly available since the 2019 season is a pavilion at the west end of the new Dorrance Field soccer and lacrosse venue, which will be used for similar tailgating experiences.

"There's no stadium in the country like Kenan," says John Brunner, associate athletic director for game management. "We're leveraging our strength—our location in the pines. We wanted to create a beer garden in the woods, take advantage of nature and develop some tailgating and eating spaces."

The 2017 Tar Heel football season marked the debut of tented villages for tailgating in various pockets around Kenan Stadium, most notably in the amphitheater to the west of the stadium.

"Chapel Hill as a town and a campus has a certain nostalgia that a lot of campuses do not have," says Parker Duffey, the founder of The Tailgate Guys, a company that specializes in managing and operating tailgate venues across venues nationwide. "It's a special place. You do not have a lot of open spaces, but instead you have beautiful courtyards and old oak trees, meandering walkways that wrap around and through campus and the woods. It's a sharp scene."

The 2018 season featured the unveiling of 22-inch wide individual chairs with arm rests and pop-up bottoms throughout the stadium that significantly improved fan comfort and the overall aesthetics of the interior bowl.

The 2019 season was highlighted by the return of Coach Mack Brown, six sold-out home games and the first time alcohol sales had been permitted in college stadiums in the state of North Carolina.

The 2020 season … well, let's just put an asterisk beside those three Covid-stained months from a fan's perspective, though the Tar Heel team itself was quite successful with its 8-3 regular-season performance and run to the Orange Bowl.

Now 2021 beckons and with it follows a continued refinement and upgrading of the Carolina game day experience.

"Football marketing is 85 percent winning and 15 percent all the other things," says Rick Steinbacher, senior associate athletic director. "Coach Brown has done everything right in establishing the winning. Now as an Athletic Department staff, we're doing everything we can to enhance the game day experience. We want our long-time fans to enjoy their experience, notice the improvements we've made, and we want younger fans to enjoy a more engaging, fun environment."

Only 50 fans were allowed in Kenan Stadium for the Tar Heels' 2020 opener against Syracuse, and a state-mandated limit of 3500 was imposed for other home games against Virginia Tech, N.C. State, Wake Forest, Notre Dame and Western Carolina. Brunner says his office has used the procedural challenges of the pandemic to improve permanent structures for 2021 and beyond.

"What's the old saying, 'Never let a crisis go to waste?'" he says. "Our thinking is, 'Let's not go back to normal. Let's create a new normal.' What can we do differently? How can we be more efficient, creative, more engaged?"

Brunner notes that the home opener in 2019 against Miami was the first game ever for alcohol sales in Kenan Stadium, and surveys following the game indicated that "fan satisfaction" registered at 93 percent overall and 90 percent were either positive or neutral on the alcohol component of the experience. Surveys the rest of that year came in consistently at 90 percent satisfaction or higher.

Initiatives in recent years that are being expanded and enhanced include more restroom maintenance, mobile concessions ordering, concessions from local restaurants, digital ticket scanners, complimentary water stations, cashless food and merchandise transactions and volunteers called "Carolina Ambassadors" who roam the outside and inside of the stadium answering questions, offering directions and all manner of assistance to fans. Tickets and parking passes are being delivered electronically this year as well.

The new season also marks the first of Carolina's relationship with REVEL^XP as its "official experience provider" for all Tar Heel athletics. REVEL^XP is a multi-faceted company that works with college and professional teams to maximize the fan experience—through providing premium tenting, accessories, food and beverage and extending through concessions to merchandise to entertainment.

Ben Sutton is a Winston-Salem based entrepreneur with extensive experience in the business side of athletics. He created REVEL^XPin 2020 to work with university and professional partners to "re-imagine" game day and non-game day experiences.

"We've got a lot of exciting ideas in the works," Steinbacher says. "We have some initiatives for this year and even more for 2022. Ben believes that fan bases are getting older and that the younger generation doesn't do exactly as their parents and grandparents did—buy season tickets every year and go to every game. The sports world has to adapt and not lose that appeal to the younger market. REVEL^XPwill help us re-invent the game day experience and create social spaces and keep the next generation connected."

Executing those plans and ideas over this fall and coming football seasons is Hill, the general manager over REVEL^XPChapel Hill operations. She's worked in game management and entertainment not only at South Carolina but at her alma mater, LSU, and did a stint at Carolina for two years from 2010-12 with Tar Heel Athletic Hospitality. She points to two mature pines just off the sidewalk along Stadium Drive that will serve as the entrance to Kenan Pines, then imagines a gameday setting of music, laughter and the kind of chatter we've been without for too long.

"We've missed those connections for a year and a half," she says. "That's what college football is all about. We're looking to create special moments."

Lizzie should know. She met husband, Don, at the 2010 Tar Heel win over Clemson.

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace has covered Tar Heel football since 1990 and has written often about the game-day experience, most notably in his book "Football in a Forest—The Life and Times of Kenan Stadium." Follow him @LeePaceTweet and write him at leepace7@gmail.com.

Related Videos