SAN DIEGO — San Diego State’s Director of Mission Valley Development, Derek Grice sat down with CBS 8 ahead of the highly anticipated opening of the new Snapdragon Stadium. He answered several questions including what the fan experience will be like, the shape of the seating bowl and he even explained how the university tied in pieces of the old Qualcomm Stadium into the new look at Snapdragon Stadium.
The Aztecs will host the first game at Snapdragon Stadium against the Arizona Wildcats at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 3. Tune into CBS 8 for the game and for a pregame show at 11 a.m.
Are you happy with how Snapdragon looks?
I’m ecstatic, we've got a lot we still have to do, but really, really proud of the product that we've been all put together… When you look at our building, we designed this to be unique to San Diego. And I believe that we put together probably one of the best college experiences and atmospheres in the country, pound per pound. That is what we're trying to accomplish. And I think we've been able to do that.
Fan Experience
We really wanted to make it a very intimate environment, we really wanted to bring the fans closer to the field, all of our premium products closer to the field, our seating bowl is a little steeper than you see in a lot [of other stadiums]. We also made sure, for us and this is unique to a college stadium, every one of our seats as a chair back seat.
We also really wanted to make sure that we embodied San Diego in this community and so we brought that into it in a lot of different ways. But we also knew that we wanted to create an atmosphere of experiential so that people had an opportunity to experience different things every time they came back to the stadium and I think we've been able to accomplish that.
Home field advantage
[The fans being closer and bowl being steeper] should make it louder. We believe that we're going to create a unique home field advantage for our student athletes that something that quite honestly they haven't had in the past, at a Qualcomm when you had such a cavernous big building. Now you bring our fans and you get them closer to the field. You get them more involved and more engaged, and I think our student athletes are really going to feed off of that.
Tying in parts of the old stadium to Snapdragon Stadium
We wanted to make sure that we connected with the community here in San Diego. We did that by use of local artists, through storytelling graphics, we did what we like to call easter egg moments where we've taken some things from the old stadium from Jack Murphy, Qualcomm, San Diego State and whatever you want to refer to it as. That was a building that meant so much to so many people and we want to create a stadium that's going to create new memories and we wanted to have that connection. So we brought in pieces and brought that history here and tell the history of the land and the area around it. Everything from when it was Kumeyaay land to dairy farms to the stadium to now Snapdragon Stadium.
Watch the full interview with Derek Grice below: