FAU aiming for new stadium in 2011

Florida Atlantic now plans to open an on-campus football stadium in time for the 2011 season, one year later than the Owls' original target date.

The 30,000-seat facility would be the centerpiece of FAU's "Innovation Village," which already includes a new fitness center and alumni center, and eventually will see additional dormitory space and retail shops. School officials have said the football stadium would cost somewhere around $63 million.

"All the elements are coming together now," FAU athletic director Craig Angelos said.

Those elements, Angelos said, include movement on a naming-rights deal that would see FAU collect $10 million in a 10-year span. The school might begin the process of securing bonds this fall and aims to have a groundbreaking sometime next spring.

Numerous factors brought on by the economic downturn led to delays in the building process. FAU even scheduled Michigan State to be the first opponent in the new stadium in September 2010, although that contract could now be revisited because of the revised building timeframe.

"I can now talk to new recruits coming in about how we will have a new stadium by 2011," FAU coach Howard Schnellenberger said. "It is irreversible and irrevocable. The architects that have already been working, the builders that have been pricing out material, the amount of money the university has already put into this venture ... rest assured, there is no ifs, ands or buts about it."

The stadium has been Schnellenberger's biggest quest of his decade at FAU. Before he arrived, not only was there no football at the school, but there were some who questioned if Schnellenberger - who was instrumental in laying the foundation for Miami's transformation into a national power in the early 1980s - could turn a commuter school into a football school.

He's gotten quick results. FAU moved briskly from what was Division I-AA to college football's highest level, won the Sun Belt Conference in 2007 and is the only school in football-crazed Florida to win bowl games in each of the past two seasons.

"For us to build a stadium in the 10th year of our existence, from 2001 to 2011, when we get that done, that's going to be recordsetting," Schnellenberger said. "See if anyone else has ever done it. And to do it in a place not only where they didn't have a football team but at a school where they didn't even have interest in a football team ... this will happen."

The new stadium will take about 18 months to build. Until it opens, FAU plans to continue playing home games at Lockhart Stadium, about a half-hour south in Fort Lauderdale.