Sports and Recreation
DeLand hosts all home games for Stetson University Hatters athletic teams. The men's and women's basketball teams play at the J. Ollie Edmunds Center, an on-campus arena which opened in 1974 and seats approximately 5,000 spectators.
The Hatters baseball team plays at Melching Field at Conrad Park, a 2,500-seat ballpark located off campus just south of downtown DeLand. Melching Field was built in 1999 and is recognized as one of the finer college baseball venues in the NCAA, having hosted numerous Atlantic Sun Conference championships and other baseball related tournaments and events. Prior to the opening of Melching Field, the Hatters played at old Conrad Park on the same site, which also hosted spring training games in the 1940s and 1950s and the DeLand Red Hats, a Florida State League minor league franchise.
Adjacent to Melching Field is Spec Martin Stadium, a 6,000-seat football stadium. Spec Martin Stadium currently hosts DeLand High School Bulldog football and soccer games. The stadium had served as home of the Stetson University Hatters football team before the school discontinued its football program in the early 1960s, and will once again host Hatters football when Stetson joins the Pioneer Football League in 2013. As part of Stetson's re-entry into college football, Spec Martin Stadium is scheduled to undergo significant renovations, including a new pressbox, handicap and premium seating areas, and new locker room facilities.
DeLand has been called the "skydiving capital of the world", with the majority of skydiving industries calling it home. The skydiving industry employs over 500 workers from the DeLand area. This in combination with the tourist end of the industry makes it one of the town's largest supporters and invaluable to the local economy.
Read more about this topic: DeLand, Florida
Famous quotes containing the words sports and, sports and/or recreation:
“Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“In the end, I think you really only get as far as you’re allowed to get.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 87 (June 17, 1991)
“Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor—because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them ... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.”
—Angela Davis (b. 1944)