The ASUI-Kibbie Activity Center is a multi-purpose indoor athletic stadium on the campus of the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. It is the home of the Idaho Vandals of the Western Athletic Conference and is used for intercollegiate competition in four sports: football, basketball, tennis, and indoor track & field.

	Capacity		16,000 (football), 7,000 (basketball)
	Opened		1975
	Owner		University of Idaho
	Operator		University of Idaho
	Surface		RealGrass Pro

More commonly known as the Kibbie Dome, the venue with a wooden barrel-arched roof opened in September 1975, enclosing an outdoor concrete football stadium built four years earlier on the site of the demolished Neale Stadium, seen in this early 1950s photo. With just 16,000 permanent seats, it is currently the smallest home stadium for football in Division I-A. Since February 2001, the Kibbie Dome has been reconfigured for basketball games and is referred to as the Cowan Spectrum, seating 7,000. The elevation of the playing surface is 2610 feet (795 m) above sea level.

Construction

The stadium was built in stages and took several years to complete. Originally, the new football stadium was to be outdoors and seat over 23,000 spectators, with an adjacent 10,000 seat indoor arena for basketball. The PCAA conference had been launched in 1969 and Idaho was attempting to join, but political wrangling in the state legislature and subsequent budget cuts caused a change in the scope of the stadium project. This ensured that Idaho could not make the move to the PCAA; the Vandals would have to remain in the Big Sky Conference with the other state schools, Idaho State and new member Boise State.

The revised plan was for a smaller capacity football stadium, to be enclosed to allow use as a basketball arena (and indoor track and tennis as well). This multi-purpose concept had been recently used at Idaho State in Pocatello, where the Minidome had opened in 1970.

Construction on the concrete grandstands started in February 1971, after a fire destroyed the previously condemned wooden Neale Stadium in November 1969. The stadium, which opened in 1936, had been condemned the summer before the 1969 season, and the Vandal football team played its limited home schedule for the next two seasons at WSU’s Rogers Field in Pullman.

After a fire significantly destroyed that stadium’s south grandstand in April 1970, WSU played its 1970 home games in Spokane at Joe Albi Stadium, but the Vandals remained at Rogers in Pullman for four “home” games. The Vandals’ game with WSU that September 19th in Spokane was dubbed the “Displaced Bowl.” A lopsided 44-16 win for the Cougars, it was WSU’s only victory in a stretch of 22 games.

Back in Moscow, the “New Idaho Stadium” was ready by the fifth game 1971 football season, a 40-3 victory over Idaho State on October 9th. The Vandals went 8-3 in 1971, which included a school-record eight game winning streak, and won the Big Sky title. For its first four seasons (1971-74), the “new Idaho Stadium” was outdoors. In the summer of 1972, a Tartan Turf field with a roll-up mechanism was installed. The arched roof and vertical end walls were completed in time for the 1975 football season’s home opener on September 27th, unfortunately a 14-29 loss to Idaho State.

The enclosed stadium was renamed that year for William H. Kibbie, a construction executive from Salt Lake City and a primary benefactor of the project; he contributed $300,000 to initiate the funding drive.

Bill Kibbie (1918-88), originally of Bellevue, Idaho, was a UI student for less than a month in 1936 before he had to leave the university, due to family hardship. He entered the construction business, and after service as a B-24 pilot in World War II, was very successful as the head of a major contracting company in Utah. The acronym “ASUI” is for the “Associated Students of the University of Idaho,” the student government.

When the university announced it would enclose its football stadium, the fledgling Trus-Joist Company of Boise bid on and got the project. While steel and aluminum were the products of the day for domes and large unsupported buildings, Trus-Joist saw the UI stadium as a chance to demonstrate the strength, durability, and economy of their engineered wood products. From the final design to the end of construction, the enclosure project took just 10 months and $1 million to complete. In 1976, the Kibbie Dome roof won the “Structural Engineering Achievement Award” from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Trus-Joist was acquired by Weyerhaeuser in 1999.

The Kibbie Dome’s roof spans 400 feet (122 m) from sideline-to-sideline, and its maximum height is 150 feet (45 m) above the hashmarks. (Holt Arena, on the campus of Idaho State University in Pocatello, has an opposite geometry: its arched roof spans the length of the football field, rather than its width, resulting in a very low roof at the end lines and goal posts.)

Soon after completion, problems arose with the roof’s exterior. The 4.5 acre (1.8 hectare) outer surface was applied as a sprayed foam, and was found to be unsuitable for the extended annual temperature range of northern Idaho. The significant expansion and contraction caused fractures; leaks were occurring and wood rot was a potential problem by 1980. After an extended period of finger-pointing and threatened legal action, an out-of-court settlement was reached. A new superstructure with a composite roof was built over the original. Completed in the summer of 1982, the second roof shielded the first and solved the problem.

Football

The Kibbie Dome officially seats just 16,000 for football, making it the smallest venue in Division I-A, although a record crowd of 17,600 was recorded for a game with Boise State in November 1989, during the school’s I-AA Big Sky era. The football field runs an unorthodox east-west, with the press box on the south side.

For two and a half seasons, 1999-2001, the Vandals used Martin Stadium as its home field, as Idaho transitioned from Division I-AA to I-A. When Dennis Erickson returned as head football coach in 2006, there was talk of adding a second deck to the stadium to increase the football seating to 25,000, and building a new basketball arena. In February 2007, the state board of education appropriated funds to study expansion possibilities. On December 6th, the board approved funding to begin design work for $52 million in improvements, including an expansion to 20,000 seats, lowering the elevation of the playing field, and other various safety and spectator improvements.

When not used for football, the former astroturf football field was rolled up in about an hour to reveal 93,000 square feet (2.13 acres, 0.86 hectares) of polyurethane tartan surface which is used for indoor tennis and track & field. The five-lane track is 290 meters (317 yds) in length, and 9 tennis courts are lined on its infield. Basketball and volleyball courts are also lined on the tartan infield. The astroturf was spooled onto a large field-width reel at the base of the west wall.

In 1990, the original synthetic turf (Tartan Turf) of 1972 was replaced after 18 seasons. In the summer of 2007, the Kibbie Dome’s astroturf was replaced with RealGrass Pro, similar to Field Turf, a next-generation infilled synthethic turf. Unlike the carpet-like astroturf, the infilled synthetic turf is not easily rolled up in a continuous reel, and must be removed in sections. The turf sections are five yards in width, running from sideline to sideline, attached to each other with velcro. Other stadiums with RealGrass Pro include the Dallas Cowboys’ Texas Stadium and the Alamodome in San Antonio.

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