Overview:
Harder Stadium was the site of the first Super Bowl training camp, a Vietnam War protest, Grateful Dead and Beach Boy concerts, a world-renowned rugby tournament … and two NCAA College Cups
November 12, 1966 was the sunniest of autumn days.
The future of a young university campus, just a dozen years after moving from the Santa Barbara Riviera to the ocean bluffs near Goleta, looked especially bright.
Sixty years ago this week, UC Santa Barbara first opened the gates of newly built Harder Stadium.
Phil Patton, sports editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press, could barely contain his glee.
“Nov. 12 has to go down in UCSB sports history as a momentous day in its continuing development as one of the coming great universities in the West,” he declared in his “Patton’s Press Box” column.
I was 12 years old at the time and in no position to disagree.
He was my dad, after all.
Forty-four years later, after taking Pop’s place as the newspaper’s resident sports pundit, I listened to former Gaucho tight end John Keever describe the awe he felt amidst the warmth of that afternoon.
He watched 11,500 Gaucho football fans — just 500 short of the capacity of a stadium that would later expand to 16,000 — stream through the shiny new gates.
“The band marched through Isla Vista, and the students followed the band into the stadium,” he recalled.
“And then the students lined up and made a tunnel outside the locker room, and we came out of the tunnel to the tune of ‘The Lonely Bull.’”
The Gauchos were so aroused by the pageantry, if not the trumpet solo of that Herb Albert hit, that they stomped all over Cal Western, 64-3.
That opponent has changed its name twice since then — first to U.S. International University and then to Alliant International University — in an obvious attempt to distance itself from such a shellacking.
Keever, who became the leader of a booster group known as the Gaucho Order, contributed to that onslaught by catching one of quarterback Mike Hitchman’s three touchdown passes.
I got writer’s cramp that day as the young statistician for Dad’s radio broadcast, adding up the Gauchos’ 586 yards of total offense and 35 first downs.
My right hand still spasms from the memory.
Pack-ed House
Gaucho coach “Cactus” Jack Curtice was so emboldened by the big-time feel of his new home — then known as Campus Stadium — that he talked Vince Lombardi into training his Green Bay Packers there just two months later.
The Pack had to get ready for some sort of new, sporting experiment called … the Super Bowl.
Curtice, who doubled as UCSB’s athletic director, kept the ball rolling in 1968 by having stadium lights installed.
A year later, the university added 4,000 seats to the south end to meet the requirements the NCAA set for its entry into Division 1 football.
The Gauchos were setting their sights high while moving from the football-less West Coast Conference to the new Pacific Coast Athletic Conference — precursor of the Big West.
The master plan envisioned an increase of Harder Stadium’s seating to 33,000.
Curtice, who began his head coaching career at West Texas State in 1940, became one of the game’s greatest innovators of the passing game. The shovel pass, now widely used in college football, was his invention.
Sports-writing pundits gave him the nickname “Mr. Forward Pass” during a tenure which took him to such schools as Utah and Stanford.
He tapped into those connections when he arrived at UCSB in 1963 by fund-raising for the new stadium and arranging a major-college schedule for his Gauchos.
Cactus Jack told Pops that he had set up future home games against the likes of Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Air Force.
Contracts were already in place for road games at Washington, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Northwestern.
“And should the day come when the new stadium’s seating capacity is tripled,” Dad gushed, “then it might well be possible that UCSB could offer a sufficient guarantee to bring a Big Ten, Southeastern or even Pacific Eight Conference team here to Santa Barbara.”
But John Lennon could’ve offered them a cautionary tale with the lyrics he’d write later in the song Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy).
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
On the same November day that Harder Stadium opened in 1966, a contingent of Viet Cong guerillas emerged from the cloak of a monsoonal rainstorm and inflicted heavy casualties upon a platoon of U.S. Marines defending the village of An Trach.
The Vietnam War was blowing up, and UCSB’s students were soon parading into their stadium with different intent.
A crowd of 7,000 was brought to full boil there on the afternoon of February 25, 1970 when William M. Kunstler, famed defense attorney of the Chicago 8, spoke against the war.
UCSB’s student newspaper, known then as El Gaucho, quoted him as saying, “If resistance does not succeed — revolution.”
When Kunstler was done, the madding crowd stormed out to a planned rally just a few blocks away at Isla Vista’s Perfect Park.
A riot erupted there when two sheriff’s deputies tried to arrest a former UCSB student who was carrying a bottle of wine.
Rocks filled the air instead of footballs, denting police cars and breaking windows at several nearby businesses. The confrontation between the police and protesters soon grew violent.
By early morning the next day, the Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America had been burned to the ground.
Rooting at football games was no longer the extracurricular of choice for a student at UCSB.
Game Over
The team, meanwhile, got the flip side of the Cal Western experience during its first two games of the 1971 season.
UCSB ticked off Washington when it briefly silenced an opening-day, Husky Stadium crowd of 56,000.
Quarterback Randy Palomino capitalized on his team’s recovery of a game-opening fumble by driving the Gauchos 57 yards to a touchdown.
UCSB whooped it up when Mike Anton Scott caught his 8-yard scoring pass.
But that just made UW want to whup the Gauchos to no end.
Sonny Sixkiller, the Huskies’ legendary quarterback, was later quoted as telling his teammates, “This is (expletive) up … We have to get it together.”
Nine UW touchdowns later, the Gauchos slinked out of Seattle with a 65-7 defeat.
Tennessee called off the dogs a lot sooner the next week in its 48-6 victory over UCSB before a Knoxville crowd of 65,114.
The Gauchos never did get to Wisconsin and Northwestern the following season.
Dwindling attendance at home games led to a budget shortfall of $100,000 after the 1971 season.
The university waited until an unsuspecting Cactus Jack left for a league meeting in Los Angeles before announcing the bad news:
UCSB was dropping football.
The university was already in a cancel-culture mood about Harder Stadium.
Rock ‘n’ Roll concerts were ruled out of bounds in November of 1969 after a ticket-less mob crashed through the gates during an appearance of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
The lyrics “Teach Your Children” never sounded so haunting.
The dried-up revenue stream, however, forced UCSB to reconsider the stadium’s use a few years later.
The Grateful Dead replaced the dearly departed Gaucho gridders as stadium tenants, performing there in 1973, 1974 and again in 1978.
Jerry Garcia and the boys were soon followed into the stadium by a Who’s Who of Rock.
They included Rod Stewart in 1973; the Beach Boys in 1975; Jefferson Starship, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Heart in 1976, and Fleetwood Mac and Kenny Loggins in 1977.
Jack Johnson, a 1997 graduate of UCSB, returned to play at Harder Stadium in 2008.
School officials also gave a nod to its gridiron past on the 10th anniversary of its 1971 dissolution. It renamed Campus Stadium after former coach and athletic director Theodore “Spud” Harder.
Spud had brightened the darkest days of the Great Depression for Santa Barbara by guiding the 1936 Gauchos — newly renamed from its original moniker of “Roadrunners” — to a 9-1 season.
The team was loaded with big-time players which included wingback Howard Yeager and guard Doug Oldershaw, both of whom continued on to play for the NFL’s New York Giants.
UCSB students Brad Tisdale and Gary Rhodes wanted more than just a name change at Harder Stadium when they enrolled in the early 1980s.
They enlisted the help of Gaucho Hall of Famers Mike Moropoulos and Sut Puailoa, both of whom had retired from local high school coaching gigs, to start a club football program in 1983.
The entire student body jumped aboard the bandwagon in 1985 by funding an official return to NCAA football at the Division 3 level.
Mike Warren, another former Gaucho star who had coached at Carpinteria and Lompoc high schools, was hired to take charge at his alma mater.
Within just a few seasons, Warren and Rick Candaele had elevated an entertaining UCSB program to the Division 2 level.
And then they got blindsided by the NCAA.
A new rule forbade Division 1 schools from playing any of their sports at a lower level.
A student referendum to increase the necessary investment failed … just barely.
UCSB quickly dropped the sport again after the 1991 season as though it were a greased pigskin.
That Empty Feeling
The late Vince Lombardi would’ve been appalled.
“A school without football,” he once opined, “is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.”
But what floats the boat of a Packer backer in Green Bay may not have the same buoyancy for a Gaucho groupie on the balmy shores of Santa Barbara.
The marine air soon turned Harder Stadium’s metal structure into a rusting, haunted house.
Not only did its lights go dark, they dropped their giant bulbs on whomever dared venture below.
“One of our art professors almost got hit,” former A.D. Gary Cunningham recalled. “Lights would fall all the time.”
Few fans dared to brave the bombardment during UCSB soccer games even though both the men’s and women’s teams earned national rankings in the 1980s.
The rough-hided rugger crowd was an exception. It descended upon Harder Stadium in the thousands for the annual, world-renowned Santa Barbara Rugby Tournament.
UCSB started its own successful program the same year the stadium opened.
The tournament was hailed as the largest rugby event on earth when 80 clubs including sides from Wales and England showed up in 1980.
The State of California finally relented to the liability issues and replaced the light stanchions in 2002.
But other land mines remained hidden in the Harder Stadium grass.
The storm drains, entrenched safely outside the sidelines for football games, were dangerously in play in the wider spread of a soccer pitch.
“We became famous for those drains,” UCSB men’s soccer coach Tim Vom Steeg pointed out. “Somebody who didn’t know much about the stadium would be running down the right-hand side … and guess what would happen?
“They’d step into the drain and fall face-first.”
But Vom Steeg, who danced around those drains as a Gaucho defender from 1985 to 1988, was determined to bring UCSB soccer into the new century when he was hired as head coach in 1999.
Moving the drains was one of his first moves.
“We had 1.9 scholarships, a travel budget which probably got us to Bakersfield and back, and the assistant coach was getting paid $5,000,” he said. “And the reality was that there probably hadn’t been a cent put into this stadium since I’d been here.
“And somewhere along the way came the crazy idea that not only could we win a national championship, but we could actually host one here on this campus.”
A Full Cup
The student body’s affection for “The World’s Game” erupted into full bloom during the Gauchos’ run to the 2004 NCAA final at the Home Depot Center in Carson.
A crowd of 11,214 — a Harder Stadium soccer record at the time — watched the Gauchos advance to the College Cup Final Four with a 4-1, quarterfinal victory over Virginia Commonwealth.
The students rushed the field in celebration before triumphantly carrying one of the soccer goals out of the stadium as though it were the reincarnation of William Kunstler.
Security officials stopped them just outside the gates.
But no one thought to guard the place two years later when UCSB played UCLA on a snowy pitch in St. Louis in the championship match of the 2006 College Cup.
Hundreds of students who’d watched the telecast of the Gauchos’ 2-1, upset victory headed straight for Harder Stadium.
They broke through the gates, hoisted one of its goals back on their shoulders and paraded it through Isla Vista before tossing it into the ocean.
The waves washed over it like champagne.
Two years later, Vom Steeg’s quest for bringing the College Cup to Harder Stadium got a willing partner in his new boss.
“We looked at what the needs were, which were many,” Gaucho A.D. Mark Massari said at the time. “This stadium is aging.
“It has a beautiful heart to it, but it’s aging.”
UCSB won the bid for the 2010 College Cup — and then had just 133 days to complete the five improvements that Massari had promised.
The field, which had been named after the family of former Gaucho Will Meredith, was improved with top-of-the-line turf and a new irrigation system.
A state-of-the-art, 62-foot-tall scoreboard with video capabilities was erected just inside the stadium’s entrance.
The press box was renovated, and both a new concession stand and ticket booth were erected.
Massari also rallied UCSB’s long-forgotten football alumni to the nearly $2 million cause.
“Massari called me and said he had this idea that maybe we should keep the legacy of football here — not futból, but football, which started this stadium,” Keever said. “He challenged me.
“He said, “How’d you like us to build a gate here and name it after your coach?’
“I get emotional because our coach did so much for us.”
He had no problem putting Cactus Jack’s old squad back together.
“When this project started, the stories started flying on the emails,” Keever said. “We collected stories, unbelievable stories, and not about winning football games.
“They were about our teacher and our coach and what he did for us in our lifetime.”
Keever and Co. plowed right into a fund-raising campaign to get the wrought-iron “Curtice Gate” completed on time.
It fronts an entry plaza that’s adorned with two dozen palm trees.
A plaque on the gate tells the rich history of the “House that Curtice Built” with his folksy way of fundraising.
“Going downtown, he used to call it,” Keever said.
UCSB hasn’t played a football game at Harder Stadum in 35 years, but the old Gaucho gridders still support their alma mater with an endowment fund named in memory of former Gaucho Jim Barber and their magnificent media master, Donn Bernstein.
Still Alive and Kicking
Harder Stadium crackled with electricity during the season that led up to the 2010 College Cup.
The Gauchos set an NCAA record for an on-campus match when 15,896 crammed into the stadium for a September match against seventh-ranked UCLA.
Sam Hayden, UCSB’s 5-foot-11 goalkeeper, was so inspired that night that he could’ve touched the top of the new scoreboard with his goal-preventing leaps.
His career-high six saves earned a 2-0 shutout.
UCSB, which led the nation in soccer attendance for nine straight seasons from 2007 to 2015, set another NCAA record which still stands by drawing 5,873 per match in 2010.
ESPN.com writer Scott French was so impressed with the Harder Stadium atmosphere that season that he gave it the new name of “Soccer Heaven” while previewing the 2010 College Cup.
The 133-day miracle that UCSB pulled off to prepare for that event earned it another bid in 2018, with further enhancements to the field and locker rooms.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the university to withdraw from hosting the 2020 event, but soccer has helped Harder Stadium remain in the national limelight.
Plenty of Major League Soccer and top-tier international teams have played matches at the facility over the years.
Both the U.S. National Men’s and Women’s have also made Harder Stadium appearances.
The women’s squad was back last January, beating Chile 5-0 before a sellout crowd of 14,797.
In October of 1991, while Gaucho football was taking its last gasp, the USWNT used Harder Stadium for its final tuneup before FIFA’s first Women’s World Cup.
A crowd of 3,274 showed up to watch the U.S. play UCSB’s nationally ranked Gauchos before heading off to China.
UCSB star Linda Dorn Meyer had never played before a large crowd.
“Playing in front of 3,000 people was a real plus for us, for sure,” she said, “and what a great way to start off the United States women’s team.”
She could say that despite getting the Cal Western treatment in a 10-0 defeat.
That USWNT side, after all, was stacked with such legends as Michelle Akers, Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, April Heinrichs, Brandi Chastain and a four-time Gaucho All-American named Carin Jennings.
Their team made the whole world feel like Cal Western. Among their six straight wins were routs of 5-0 against Brazil, 7-0 against Chinese Taipei and 5-2 against Germany.
A Gaucho was even awarded the Golden Ball after the 2-1 victory over Norway in the championship match.
Carin Jennings celebrated her most valuable player award by tap dancing with the one and only Pelé during the post-tournament party at Guangzhou’s White Swan Hotel.
The Gaucho chant of Olé Olé Olé resonated well with the old Brazilian legend.
Soccer, meanwhile, is keeping Harder Stadium vibrant in its golden years.
It will host the Big West Conference men’s championship on Friday at 7 p.m. when UCSB faces Cal State Bakersfield.
A crowd of 11,183 fans showed up a month ago for the Gauchos’ match against Central Coast rival Cal Poly.
The Gauchos were inspired enough to romp to a 3-1 victory.
The Saturday Night Lights were back on, lighting up the place as bright as that autumn afternoon of 60 years past.