San Diego State athletics announced Tuesday that its football team will be playing its home games at Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, California for the upcoming spring and fall seasons.
The move marks the end of the Aztecs’ time at SDCCU Stadium, which has housed the team since its opening in 1967.
In a press conference Tuesday afternoon, athletic director JD Wicker said the decision was not made hastily.
“It’s a decision that was not entered into lightly,” Wicker said. “We spent a lot of time working through this.”
Dignity Health Sports Park is about two hours away from SDSU, and that’s without factoring in traffic. In addition to the increased distance for fans (roughly 115 miles) and assuming they will be allowed to attend games within the next two seasons, students will have a much more difficult time getting to Aztec home games.
Wicker said that the team is partly relying on its alumni in both Los Angeles and Orange County to help fill the stands.
“We’ll have to see the number of folks that are willing to drive up from San Diego,” Wicker said. “We do have a significant alumni base in the LA area, Orange County, so we’ll tap into that as well.”
San Diego sports fans were likely disappointed to hear another local football team would be playing its home games in Dignity Health Sports Park after the then-San Diego Chargers did so back in 2017.
When asked if other local venues were considered, Wicker said there was nothing available in the area and there was nothing that could provide student-athletes or fans the experience they would expect from a Division I program.
“If you think about a Division I college experience, there wasn’t a venue in town that was going to be consistently available for us to play in,” Wicker said. “We just didn’t think there were any venues in San Diego that could satisfy what we wanted to present for our student-athletes and also our fans. It’s going to be a heck of a better experience than what you’ve had at SDCCU in the past.”
The current plan is to have the Aztecs play conference-only games in the spring, which the Mountain West Conference announced on Aug. 5.
It hasn’t been announced whether those games will include fans or not, but Wicker said that depends on pending decisions from the state of California and Dignity Health Sports Park.
“The big thing for us is we’ll continue to monitor what’s going on in the state,” Wicker said. “We’re working with Dignity Health Sports Park already on what their plan is for allowing fans back into the building.”
