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Eck Stadium is the home of the Wichita State Shockers baseball team in Wichita, Kansas. It has played host to the Shockers in rudimentary form since 1978, and as a complete stadium since 1985. Officially called Eck Stadium, Home of Tyler Field it is sometimes informally referred to as Eck. The stadium, which has gone through numerous upgrades since its original completion, currently seats 7,851. This number does not include the Coleman Outfield Hill, made during the original construction because of lack of funding to haul the dirt away, which can seat hundreds more. On Sept. 23, 1999, The Coleman Co. put a $500,000 exclamation point on Wichita State University's Project FutureShox, a $7.8 million effort to make Eck Stadium-Home of Tyler Field the premier collegiate baseball facility in the nation. Plans to significantly upgrade Eck Stadium were first announced on Jan. 28, 1998, and were taken to another level with the leadership of Gene Stephenson, the winningest collegiate baseball coach since 1978. Several major contributors stepped forward on the front end of the project, and on Sept. 23, The Coleman Co. accentuated a project that had Wichita State on its way to having the best collegiate baseball facility in the country. ==History== When Gene Stephenson revived the Shocker baseball program in 1978, the team played most of the season at the city-owned McAdams Field. With six games left in the season, the team moved to its first on-campus facility, Shocker Field. It was a bare-bones facility built on a former golf practice course, with little more than an AstroTurf field, a chain-link fence and a scoreboard. Limited seating was installed in 1979. The first semi-permanent seating was a 322-seat bleacher section installed in 1981. In 1985, building on the momentum from the Shockers advancing all the way to the national championship game in 1982, Wichita State built a permanent 3,044-seat stadium at a cost of $700,000. It was named Eck Stadium after Wichita car dealer Rusty Eck, an early supporter of the baseball program. The stadium's first major renovation came in 1988, with the addition of a new AstroTurf surface, a rubberized warning track and 292 box seats behind the plate. The playing surface was renamed Tyler Field after Ron and Linda Tyler, who funded most of the $425,000 project. A year later, the Shockers won the only team national title by a Shocker team in any sport to date. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Eck Stadium」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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