Rose Bowl Shows Off Larger Locker Rooms
By Janette Williams Staff Writer
Pasadena Star News
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
PASADENA - The football players got bigger. The teams got bigger. So the Rose Bowl locker rooms got bigger, architect Margo Mavridis said at Monday's unveiling of the 75-year-old football stadium's new two-year, $16 million project.
“It was a great challenge,” she said of the just-finished 27,000 square-foot subterranean area. “The locker rooms needed to be updated - the old ones were the third generation for the stadium, from the late 1950s, and they've been patched and plastered together for 30 years.”
The luxurious new space is equally divided between the home and visiting teams of 89 players apiece, including showers, physical therapy areas and lockers.
The old locker rooms - now converted to a media center - allotted 5,024 square feet to the home team and a cozy 2,852 to the visitors.
Now the only difference is the color scheme - Bruins blue-and-gold carpeting and shower tiles for UCLA and neutral earth tones for the visitors.
“Last year we went to Iowa, and the visitors' locker room - maybe for a psychological advantage - was painted pink - the urinals, lockers everything,” Darryl Dunn, the Rose Bowl general manager said, laughing.
UCLA doesn't need that home-team advantage, UCLA Athletic Director Dan Guerrero said.
“You're not going to find a better `back of the house' anywhere in the country," Guerrero said. "We clearly wanted (the locker rooms) to be representative of a facility of this distinction. It was clearly the right thing to do.”
Jim Stivers, a longtime Tournament of Roses and Rose Bowl Operating Committee charter member, has been connected with the venerable stadium for 45 years.
“The locker room was not only bad, it was falling apart,” Stivers said, adding that it cost about the same to put the new locker room underground as it would have cost to rehab the old space. “It wasn't a very good advertisement for the stadium or any event here, and this was something we could get done with what (money) we had.”
Funding came from the bond measure passed several years ago for the city-owned stadium, boosted by a $1.8 million contribution from the TofR, Dunn said.
Assistant City Attorney Nicholas Rodriguez - who said his son, Nicholas, played for the Bruins last year - said it wasn't easy to expand a historic structure like the Rose Bowl “without affecting the appearance or open space.”
Going underground and building new locker rooms was the most practical choice, Dunn said, and allowed the old locker rooms to be used while excavation and construction were going on.
“What the Rose Bowl desperately needs is more space,” he said. “So we had to go out and create more space.”
