Stadium officials in Mobile are looking at a handful of practical fixes after a record-setting crowd at Ladd-Peebles Stadium ran into trouble staying cool and getting home during a recent afternoon football game.
During a meeting of the stadium’s board of directors, representatives from the University of South Alabama, board members, and the venue’s food service contractor discussed what went wrong when temperatures topped 90 degrees with heavy humidity during a Saturday matchup against a visiting Southeastern Conference opponent. The game drew the largest crowd the stadium has ever hosted and generated more revenue than the university’s GoDaddy Bowl and Senior Bowl appearances combined.
Even so, officials acknowledged the experience wasn’t perfect. An associate athletic director for the university said the concourses simply weren’t built to handle the size of the crowd that showed up. The areas are designed to comfortably serve around 28,000 to 30,000 people, but attendance that day pushed closer to 38,000, overwhelming walkways and concession areas built for a smaller footprint.
Roughly 60 medical calls came in from the stadium that afternoon, and about 10 fans were taken to a local hospital for heat-related illness. Officials stressed that heat-related medical transports aren’t new to the venue — afternoon games in a metal stadium during Alabama’s late summer heat have caused problems before — but they conceded that criticism over water and concession shortages, much of it aired on social media afterward, was pushing them to make changes before the next major crowd arrives.
The stadium’s food service provider said staffing wasn’t the core problem; on the day in question, the venue had roughly 71,000 bottles of water on hand, or about a bottle and a half per attendee, and never actually ran out. Instead, the issue was distribution — fans buying a dozen bottles at a time created bottlenecks, and warm bottles needing time to cool down couldn’t keep pace with demand. The contractor said adding more water troughs to speed up cooling, along with parking a trailer to help transport ice more efficiently to the concourse, are both under consideration.
Board members also revisited the venue’s long-standing rule barring fans from bringing in their own water and beverages, with at least one board member saying he wasn’t even aware the policy existed and suggesting it should be reconsidered. The board’s president said a range of options, including that policy, will be up for discussion going forward.
Transportation proved to be another sore spot. WAVE Transit buses running fans from the Bel Air Mall parking lot to the stadium saw roughly 10,000 riders that day, thousands more than a typical game draws, and wait times stretched from about 15 minutes early in the day to as long as two hours as kickoff approached. Board members suggested spreading bus pickup locations across the city, including downtown, rather than centralizing service at a single lot, noting that visiting fans staying in downtown hotels had to travel out to Bel Air just to catch a shuttle back toward downtown.
With another sizable crowd expected when the university hosts Navy in late November, stadium and university officials say they intend to have adjustments in place well before then.