This weekend was the inaugural football game in Florida Atlantic University’s brand new football stadium! It was a total BLAST! The stadium itself is beautiful and is a welcome addition to our campus. While I think the name of “FAU Stadium” is boring and generic, I hope that next year it will be renamed to Howard Schnellenberger Stadium to honor Coach Schnellenberger who has worked for the last 13 years to get a stadium on FAU’s main campus in Boca Raton. If that name sounds familiar, it should, he is the former head coach of the University of Miami’s national championship team in 1983, worked with Bear Bryant at Alabama (and recruited Namath there!), former head coach for the University of Louisville and now he has built up the FAU football program for the last eleven years. The stadium is the culmination of his work at the university and we are all indebted to him for it.

While the FAU Owls did not bag a win in their home opener — or score — it was so much fun. The stadium was abuzz with life and energy, even in our terrible fourth quarter slump. I cannot wait for next week’s game against Middle Tennessee State, I just hope I don’t tailgate too much! Speaking of tailgating, the OWL Photography Club was on-hand for the campus’s first ever tailgate and it was a campus-wide party. We parked all the way in one of the south lots furthest from the stadium and by the time my girlfriend and I got to the stadium, I think I saw people tailgating in every parking lot we passed. The Breezeway quad was packed to the gills with frats, sororities, and other clubs all partying it up in school spirit. I took a ton of pictures that still need to be edited but will be on our Facebook page. In the upcoming games, I hope that we will be able to get some media passes to shoot the action from the field. For this game, our treasurer Melissa was on-field shooting but I want to push to get at least 5 or 6 of us down there to broaden the experience for everyone in the club. I am anxious to see her shots but may have to wait since she was shooting for the school newspaper, the University Press/UP. We will make sure that we get some FAU Owls coverage before the season ends in December!

The best part of our stadium besides the awesome Jumbotron? You can see the Atlantic Ocean from the press boxes, only stadium in the country with that kind of view!