History
Officially opened on September 15, 1962 as Conrad Stadium, in honor of former university trustee and R.J. Reynolds executive William J. Conrad, the stadium was originally constructed with 10,000 permanent seats. The stadium was the first venue in either North or South Carolina to install artificial turf. The Mountaineers and Elon staged the first game on fake grass in the Carolinas on October 3, 1970. Seating capacity was expanded to 18,000 following the 1978 season. The stadium was the backdrop for the second college football game ever televised by ESPN as the Mountaineers played the Western Carolina Catamounts for the Old Mountain Jug in 1979. Completion of an extensive renovation and restoration project on the original 10,000 seats in 1995 readjusted the seating capacity to 16,650. A state-of-the-art "AppVision" video board was added in 1999 and enlarged prior to the 2001 campaign, while Appalachian was one of the initial collegiate programs in the country to install FieldTurf at its football venue in 2003.
Conrad Stadium was renamed on September 3, 1988 in honor of Kidd Brewer, one of the most successful head coaches in Appalachian football history and a colorful part of North Carolina history. Brewer, a Winston-Salem native, served as head football coach of the Mountaineers from 1935–38, compiling a 30–5–3 overall mark in his four seasons at the helm of the Apps. An All-American at Duke, Brewer's 1937 squad was unbeaten and unscored upon in the regular season.
Appalachian carried a 30 game winning streak, the longest in Division I at the time, before losing to the Georgia Southern Eagles on October 20, 2007. Prior to that game, the Mountaineers' last home loss was in the first round of the playoffs, 13–14, to Maine on November 30, 2002.
Read more about this topic: Kidd Brewer Stadium
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