Well, it should be clarified that this thread concerns a stadium located in Athens, Georgia, USA (hometown of the REM, among others) and not in Athens capital of Greece!
Greece has already their hands full with all the name disputes they need , do not bring us more :lol::lol::lol::lol::lol:
Why does it look like it has some proper red seats in that 2nd and 3rd pic but is mostly just bleachers? Did they run out of money or did they all get broken? It looks very very stupid.
This is a college football stadium for the University of Georgia. Don't know why Athens is named as it is, sorry!
As for the broken-up colours there, those are actually called 'seat-backs' or something similar. College stadiums, unlike pro football stadiums, are generally bleachers or rows of seats, so the colleges sell these seat-backs for $20 or something and it attaches to the bench and then basically acts as a cushion/support like a seat would at an all-seater stadium. People just leave them there if they have season tickets.
John Milledge, a former governor of Georgia, donated land for the university and named the area Athens, in honor of the ancient Greek center of culture and learning.
The Calatrava roof was put away for the summer for cleaning. They will bring it back next year.
Why Athens? As the US was healing from the ravages of the Civil War and coming into its own internationally, a lot of educators in the US were brought up in the classical traditions. Thus, they paid homage(s) to ancient Greece and Rome. So the home of UGA was named Athens. Thus, all those fraternites and sororities are named after the Greek alpahbet; a lot of college athletic teams are called the Spartans (SPARRRTAAHHH!! :lol: ), the Trojans, etc., etc.
So great was the infatuation of 19th century America with classical Greece, that the only complete, full-scale replica of the Parthenon -- and how it would've looked if it had not been destroyed -- stands in, of all places, the world capital of country music -- Nashville, TN. See in the link.
Fraternities and sororities were established with Greek letter titles in the early part of the 19th century. Phi Beta Kappa began the trend, then several fraternities followed beginning with Kappa Alpha in 1825...36 years prior to the beginning of the Civil War.
Neither the naming of Athens in 1801 or the association of Greek symbols and letters had anything to do with the Civil War in America. American "infatuation" with ancient Greece has much more to do with honoring the advancements of Greek culture that are still evident in modern society. It's an homage, not an infatuation.
-The University of Georgia, home of Sanford Stadium, was founded in 1785 and is the oldest state supported university in the U.S. UGA is ranked #19 among the top 50 American universities. There are 34,000 students enrolled at UGA.
The finals of the 1996 Olympic Soccer competitions took place in Sanford Stadium. It was located outside of the host city (Atlanta). Because the required dimensions of a soccer field are wider than those of an American Football field, the hedges that surrounded the field needed to be removed for the event. Why can't all American football stadiums fit a soccer pitch properly?
This place was built in 1929. It's not a new stadium that is built for all these events. It was built for Georgia football because that's all there was then.
One thing: I don't even like American Football, especially the stadiums that can't easily be fitted with a soccer field. Are there any other American Football stadiums that can't fit a soccer field?
And I hope that an Olympic soccer final will never be held outside a host city's metropolitan area again.
First, thats a pretty dumb thing to say. You can condemn a stadium for not being able to host a sport it wasnt built for. Thats like hating soccer stadiums for having poor sight lines for American Football. Well no shit they have bad sightlines...wrong sport!
Just wow...
Most American Football stadiums can host a soccer match, just not up to regulation. Very few are big enough.
Doesn't the University of Georgia field a soccer team? How about playing their home games in that stadium? You may say, Hey, that stadium is way too big for them. But, who knows? Maybe in a not too far distant future soccer could become really popular with the college sports fans.
Having games in a stadium that large will have a negative effect on sport's popularity. And I'm not making an indictment on soccer in the US.
But the rules of Title IX (US law for gender equality in college athletics) make growing the popularity of soccer very difficult at the college level. I won't go into a detailed debate about the law, but the result is that very few universities can fund non-revenue generating sports (basically everything outside of football and men's basketball) including soccer.
In the case of Georgia (like many other universities these days), they can only field a women's team due to scholarship rules and funding. Again, not trying to disparage women's sports, but they don't draw nearly the money or fans as the men's sports do.
They play in separate stadium. To give a sense of difference in support from men's football to women's soccer, I took the following excerpts from the UGA athletics website about their soccer facilities:
The Bulldogs felt right at home as they advanced to their first-ever tournament final, facing eventual champion Florida in front of 2,265 fans, the fourth largest crowd in facility history.
Total capacity for the stadium is approximately 1,750 spectators.
As you can see, even with heavy promotion, it would very difficult for the Georgia soccer team to fill even a small fraction of Sanford stadium. As long as Title IX stays in effect, all men's sports outside of football and basketball will be severely limited.
^^ The athletics conference in which Georgia competes, the Southeastern Conference, doesn't even sponsor men's soccer -- Kentucky and South Carolina's men's soccer teams play in Conference USA as a result.
i can see that there are some scattered plastic seats here like on the florida stadium, for those people who pay extra for a seat. at first you would think that the capacity would drop if everybody payed for the seat , since the 92 746 capacity is with mostly bleachers. But since the have to keep in mind that every ticket holder might want a seat, and if one seat would be slightly larger than the bleacher space assigned to each ticket, every row would risk getting messed up.
so wouldnt this mean that this stadium should be a 92 700 seater even when every seat is a plastic seat ? since those seats realistically have to take up the same amount of space as the bleacher space assigned to each ticket , hence same capacity with seats as with bleachers ?
Those clamped-on seats are the same width as the marked width on the bleachers, so yes you get the same capacity with those clamped-on seats as you do without them. I believe the big difference in the capacity comes from the fact that permanent seats come with arm rests. Instead of a thin line of tape separating seats, you now have a physical space separating seats... thus a lower capacity with all-seaters.
Could we rename the thread to " Athens, GA - Sanford Stadium ( 92,746)" ?
It really is quite misleading. I've been to both of those Athens and was positively surprised, but the first thing that comes to ones mind is indeed Athens in Greece.
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