FirstBank Stadium and its attached facilities, home of the Vanderbilt football team, are currently undergoing a significant renovation. As a result, the Commodores are playing the 2023 college football season on a field directly adjacent to a construction site. Its renovation is nowhere near finished.
Vanderbilt is not the first team to undergo a significant overhaul to its stadium during the season. It’s not that uncommon and this was always the plan.
That doesn’t make the current situation any less jarring from a visual standpoint. Here is how it looked ahead of Week 2:
Construction will not be finished on the stadium and its surrounding facilities until 2024. It will be one of the better looking football stadiums in the SEC when it is completed.
The $300 million investment will also see upgrades to the practice facilities for both the football and basketball teams. Changes to the current football set-up will include:
- 100,000-square-foot indoor practice facility.
- Premium seating and loge boxes.
- Video board and stadium acoustics system.
- Dining facility five times greater in size.
- Stadium concourse doubled in size.
Vanderbilt released renderings when the project was first announced back in 2021.
Vanderbilt kicked around the idea of playing at an alternate location, but it is committed to playing at its home field. Head coach Clark Lea joked that the jackhammer blasting away outside of his office is inconvenient, but he has learned to celebrate it as a sign of progress.
Vanderbilt is making due.
As the construction continues, visiting teams do not have a locker room. They have a tent.
Texas Tech is in a similar situation and the Red Raiders are housing opponents in a nearby trailer. The Commodores are housing opponents in a tent, which has long been the topic of conversation.
Kentucky will play in Nashville this weekend and its players aren’t concerned with the lack of facilities. However, until Friday, nobody really knew what the inside of the tent actually looked like.
Enter Maggie Davis and Eli Gehn, two Lexington-based reporters who went inside the belly of the beast. They took a tour of the visiting locker room and revealed what it looks like inside.
The tent offers the bare minimum— but considering that it is a tent, it could be much worse.
The plan is for Vanderbilt to have its visiting locker room ready for 2024. In the meantime, throughout the remainder of the 2023 season, opponents will be confined to a tent.