History
The stadium was built in 1966 and is named after Theodore "Spud" Harder, a former coach of the Gauchos' football team. It hosted Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers who trained there ahead of the 1967 Super Bowl I. The UC-Santa Barbara football team played their home games at Harder Stadium until football was cut after the 1972 season due to budget cuts. UCSB brought football back as a non-scholarship sport in 1983 and by 1987 was playing a full Division II and III schedule. In 1992, the NCAA ruled that Division I colleges must play at the Division I level in all sports; UCSB and a few other universities attempted to form a non-scholarship Division I-AAA level, but the effort failed and UCSB eventually dropped football. The stadium has a capacity of 17,000 people, and currently is the largest stadium on California's Central Coast. Along with the UCSB Events Center, it is one of the more well-attended athletic venues in the Central Coast.
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“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)