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By Lindsey Coulter

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The University of North Carolina at Charlotte has broken ground on the first phase of a $70 million expansion of Jerry Richardson Stadium, a project that will add 20,000 square feet and increase stadium capacity by about 20%.

RMF Engineering is leading MEP engineering for the project, with Barton Malow serving as construction manager. McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture is the lead designer in collaboration with SLAM. Completion is expected in spring 2027.

“This project is a statement about who we are and where we are headed. It reflects the momentum we are building in academics, research and athletics,” Chancellor Sharon L. Gaber said at the groundbreaking ceremony on Aug. 27. “And it signals a new era for Charlotte football. Charlotte is ready to compete — and to win — on every stage.”

The expansion includes construction of a new tower above the existing press box. The tower will feature a training room for athletes, a new press box for broadcasters, and premium seating options such as seven luxury suites, loge boxes, ledge seating, an indoor private club and a terrace.

On game days, the tower will provide fans with state-of-the-art amenities. On non-game days, those areas will convert into team meeting and dining space. The facility also will allow student-athletes year-round dining access and enable Charlotte Athletics to host additional community events.

Approximately 2,400 seats will be added in the east concourse above the student section, bringing total capacity to around 17,700. The expansion is projected to generate nearly $2 million annually, more than doubling the university’s ticket revenue.

Interest in Charlotte football is surging. Head coach Tim Albin’s inaugural season and a six-game home schedule contributed to record demand for 2025, with the program selling out season tickets for the first time. Renewal rates among existing season ticket holders also reached an all-time high.

“What an incredible day for Charlotte Athletics, for our University and our community,” athletics director Mike Hill said. “The response to our expansion plan has been nothing short of tremendous. Now, this plan begins to take shape. Over the next two seasons, with as little interruption to the game-day experience as possible, our team will be hard at work delivering something truly special.”

While Richardson Stadium’s capacity will not be impacted during construction, university officials anticipate some modifications to the game-day experience.

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MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. — After a race to the finish line, the Charleston County School District (CCSD) has recently opened the gates to its brand new $16.5 million stadium in Mount Pleasant. With the help of the District’s trusted construction management firm, Cumming, the new District Two Regional Stadium will provide the community a modern sports facility for years to come.

The District 2 Regional Stadium in Mt. Pleasant has a seating capacity of 6,000 — 4,000 for hometown fans and another 2,000 for visitors. The sports facility is situated on a 15-acre site and includes separate home and visitor restrooms, concession stands, team meeting rooms, a state-of-the-art press box and video score board.

The District 2 stadium in Mt. Pleasant will be used as the home stadium for both Wando High School and the new Lucy Beckham High School, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2020.

The stadium was funded by the local one-cent Charleston County sales tax, which is currently projected to generate more than $650 million by 2022.

The design-build team of Hill Construction and McMillan Pazdan Smith worked a very aggressive seven-day-a-week schedule to construct the new District 2 stadium.

Experts in educational project and cost management, Cumming’s South Carolina team has provided construction management services on behalf of CCSD for multiple building programs. Cumming oversees the District’s critical construction and renovation projects to make sure the programs stay within budget and adhere to the established timelines.

“It was our job to make sure that the stadium was successfully completed and ready for the community and the District 2 athletes,” said Harold Lee, senior project manager at Cumming. “By utilizing the existing Wando High School site, we were able to take advantage of its existing parking and infrastructure facilities, which allowed us to complete a very aggressive seven-month schedule.”

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The project, known as LCLS-II, will add a second X-ray laser beam to LCLS that is 10,000 times brighter, on average, than the first and fires 8,000 times faster (up to a million pulses per second.) The project will increase the power and capacity of the LCLS for experiments to provide more in-depth view of how nature works on the atomic level and on ultrafast timescales, according to a statement.

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory that explores photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research, and is operated by Stanford University for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. To make this major upgrade a reality, SLAC teamed up with four other national labs — Argonne, Berkeley Lab, Fermilab and Jefferson Lab — and Cornell University, each of which will make key contributions to project planning as well as to component design, acquisition and construction.

“LCLS-II will take X-ray science to the next level, opening the door to a whole new range of studies of the ultrafast and ultrasmall,” said LCLS Director Mike Dunne in a statement. “This will tremendously advance our ability to develop transformative technologies of the future, including novel electronics, life-saving drugs and innovative energy solutions.”

When it debuted six years ago, LCLS was the first light source of its kind, with an X-ray microscope that uses the brightest and fasted X-ray pulses ever made to provide unknown details of the atomic world. Scientists use it each year to study fundamental process in nature. For instance, it helps capture molecular video to reveal how chemical bonds form and break; ultrafast snapshots that show electric charges as they rearrange in materials and change properties; and 3-D images of disease-related proteins that show atomic-level details that could help with medical research.

The new X-ray laser will work together with the existing one — each of which will occupy one-third of SLAC’s 2-mile long linear accelerator tunnel. They will work together to allow researchers to make observations over a wider energy range, capturing even more detailed snapshots of rapid processes.

“The upgrade will benefit X-ray experiments in many different ways, and I’m very excited to use the new capabilities for my own research,” said Brown University Professor Peter Weber, who co-led an LCLS study that used X-ray scattering to track ultrafast structural changes as ring-shaped gas molecules burst open in a chemical reaction vital to many processes in nature, in a statement. “With LCLS-II, we’ll be able to bring the motions of atoms much more into focus, which will help us better understand the dynamics of crucial chemical reactions.”

The $1 billion project is being funded by the Office of Science and is scheduled to begin operations in the early 2020s. Until then, LCLS will continue to serve the X-ray science community, except for a six-month time period in 2017 and a 12-month time period from 2018 to 2019 due to construction.
 

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