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It was an idea rooted in improving the fan experience at Rice-Eccles Stadium.
As part of a number of improvements at the home of Utah football this season, including upgraded Wi-Fi and mobile concessions ordering, the university rolled out free soda refills with the purchase of a souvenir cup.
“One of the things we wanted to do to enhance the fan experience was provide free refills on soda. We’ve seen it across other venues throughout the country, and so as a venue here, we wanted to provide that same experience,” said Collin Simmons, who oversees Rice-Eccles Stadium and the Jon M. Huntsman Center as the University of Utah’s executive director of auxiliary services.
Utah added refillable soda machines by concession stands and set up a separate line for soda refills so fans could refill their drinks without waiting in the main concessions line.
It all sounded good, but in practice, it increased wait times for fans and contributed to bottling up an already crowded stadium concourse.
Instead of being handed a full drink during the initial purchase of a soda, fans were instead given an empty cup and directed to the separate refill line, where they could fill up their cup with soda. This increased their time waiting in line, and that meant more people out on the concourse — especially during the Baylor game, where temperatures reached the high 90s.
In a letter to fans this week, Jennifer Reed, the university’s associate vice president of auxiliary services, apologized for “the additional crowding on the concourses this year related to the roll-out of a drink refill program at Rice-Eccles Stadium.”
One fan’s complaint on social media about how the soda refill lines impacted the concourses at Rice-Eccles Stadium reached athletic director Mark Harlan.
“It has not worked like we hoped. Stadium management will review before the next game. Too many of you have mentioned the problematic issues in what we thought would alleviate lines. Clearly, that ain’t happening…More to come-,” Harlan wrote on X.
While there wasn’t much that could be done with a quick turnaround from Utah’s home opener to the Week 2 matchup against Baylor, when the Utes hit the road for the next two weeks, Rice-Eccles Stadium management got to work to try and find solutions to the problem.
As No. 10 Utah returns home to host Arizona this week at Rice-Eccles Stadium in front of a sold-out crowd of 51,444, the university has made changes to try and alleviate some of the concourse congestion.
It starts with handing fans a full soda cup during the initial purchase, eliminating the need to wait in two lines. Rice-Eccles Stadium has installed more soda machines inside each concession stand for concession workers to fill up sodas, helping speed up that initial purchase.
“The first game, the process did not go as smoothly as we’d hoped,” Simmons said. “We learned a lot about how we should be handing drinks to fans filled first instead of waiting in a second line after you bought your drink.”
The amount of refill machines is also increasing.
There will be two self-serve soda refill machines at every concession stand at Rice-Eccles Stadium, which also include water for fans to fill up allowed personal water bottles. In addition to that, the plan is to have eight more “refill centers” against the walls in the east and west concourses of the stadium.
“That will be a drastic change and improvement for that particular piece,” Simmons said.
The university is close to completing the installation of the eight separate “refill centers” and hopes they will be ready to go for this Saturday’s game.
With the changes to the soda refill system, the university is hoping to get fans through the lines and back to their seats quicker, which will reduce the overall number of people on the concourse at one time.
The changes to the Rice-Eccles Stadium concourses don’t just pertain to the soda refills, as some vendors along the concourse have been moved to different locations to free up space.
“As far as the concourse goes, we have cleared off certain vendors and moved them around in a way to create every inch of that concourse so that we can maximize the space. So there’ll be less vendors and less clutter on the concourse to allow traffic flow and more queuing for the lines at each stand,” Simmons said.
The university hopes all of these changes will help alleviate some of the concourse congestion, and Utah’s game against Arizona will be the first test.
While the soda snafu exacerbated the problem, concourse crowding has been an issue for a while at Rice-Eccles Stadium, mostly due to physical limitations. The north end zone concourse is especially narrow due to the stadium running right up against South Campus Drive. In the west and east hallways, it widens, but not enough. Until a concourse expansion happens, stadium planning staff are trying to make it work as smoothly as possible in the space they do have.
“Now, will we ever alleviate the size of the concourse and a few other constraints that we have? No, until we expand that concourse — it will require a lot of funding — but maximizing every inch of that concourse is our goal,” Simmons said.
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