UMaine hopes UNI-Dome houses a field of dreams Northern Iowa is tough to beat in its home stadium

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CEDAR FALLS, Iowa – Ella Soppe takes a break from reading the campus newspaper, leans forward in the banana-yellow stadium chair that serves as her work station, and eagerly agrees to share some info about the building that serves as the centerpiece of the University of Northern Iowa campus.

She doesn’t know much about the UNI-Dome, the personable junior will tell you as she completes her shift, monitoring students who sometimes use the facility to jog or run stadium steps or throw a baseball or a football.

She’s never even been to a UNI Panther football game. But she did come here once about five years ago, when her high school in Dyersville (just head east on Route 20 toward Dubuque for an hour and half, and you can’t miss it), population 3,703, made it to the state football playoffs.

Never heard of Dyersville? Well, that’s the reason you’re reading about Ella in the first place. It’s not because she’s pleasant (as she claims all Iowans are) or because she can tell you where to find a souvenir T-shirt. It’s because she’s from Dyersville.

If you build it, they will come.

“Field of Dreams?” she quizzes, eyebrow upturned at her own hometown’s Hollywood claim to fame. “They built it there just for the movie, but they still have it there. People visit it and play games. It’s really cool.

“I’ve only been there twice, and nobody came out of the cornfield,” she says with a laugh.

The University of Maine football team had no plans to visit Dyersville on Friday, as they arrived in Iowa for a Saturday matchup against Northern Iowa in the second round of the NCAA Division I-AA playoffs.

They don’t have time for that. But that doesn’t mean the Black Bears aren’t hoping that this place, Sheriff Field inside the still-sparkling 25-year-old UNI-Dome, will turn out to be their own field of dreams.

UNI-Dome an impressive facility

The UNI-Dome is an impressive big-school amenity that the Division I-AA Panthers have used to their advantage over the years: Thanks to future NFL players like Bryce Paup and Kurt Warner, UNI has turned the arena into one of the nation’s toughest venues.

In 25 years, the school has compiled a 124-31-1 record in the UNI-Dome and has sold out all 16,324 seats seven times.

“We have a lot of tradition here, within our building, within our program,” UNI coach and alum Mark Farley says. “And we rely on the dome, by all means. We’ve had success with the dome, as our record stands, but it doesn’t win football games.”

While the exterior of the building isn’t awe-inspiring (picture the Bangor Wastewater Treatment Plant’s circular concrete facade with a PizzaDome-style geodesic cap plunked on top), the interior is another story altogether.

“It’s bigger than what I thought it was. It’s real nice,” UMaine senior Damon Boinske says, looking around the UNI-Dome and searching for just the right words to sum up the facility after the Black Bears’ Friday afternoon practice.

He settles for this: “It’s … colorful. It’s a nice place. And it’s a great opportunity to play here.”

Colorful, it certainly is. Every one of the seats in the building is a comfortable, chair-backed resting place for the football fan … or concert-goer. And every seat is a vibrant hue that combines with the bright green AstroTurf field and yellow-and-purple end zone paint scheme to make UNI-Dome seem to glow. You’ve got red sections of chairs. Purple sections. Yellow sections. And so on.

Not that the Bears will have to worry much about color come Saturday. UMaine’s players and coaches expect most of those seat-backs to be invisible on game day. They’ll likely be full of hooting, hollering Panther-backers.

Can’t stand the weather

Maybe the weather outside is frightful (daytime temps in Cedar Falls were actually a seasonal 40-ish on Friday). Maybe it’s delightful. In UNI-Dome, nobody cares.

In here (of course), it’s always the same.

UNI’s Farley says that after slogging through the muck against Eastern Illinois last week, that’s not such a bad thing.

“All I had hoped for going down to Eastern was a sunny day with no wind so that the best team could win. That’s what we fortunately have here.”

OK, it won’t be sunny. But it will be Iowa-style pleasant, that’s for sure.

“We’ll be at 72 degrees with a good surface and the best team will fare out at the end of the day,” Farley says.

Unlike some indoor surfaces where the playing turf serves as the permanent floor, at UNI-Dome, the turf is rolled out in 26 5-yard-wide strips and cinched down with ropes along each sideline.

Underneath the AstroTurf is a 200-meter running track, along with a surface that can be used for basketball or tennis.

Even when the turf is down, students pass through the UNI-Dome regularly, bringing along their baseball gloves, footballs, or running shoes to get in a quick workout.

UMaine’s dome vets

At least four Black Bears have had some experience playing football at indoor stadiums, and all look forward to Saturday’s game.

Senior Justin Davis played high school ball in Rome, N.Y., and said his one indoor outing was memorable.

“I had the privilege of playing in the Syracuse Carrier Dome, which is obviously very similar to the one that we’re playing in,” Davis says. “And that noise just ricochets off walls. If we think McNeese was loud, wait until you sit in with 17,000 in a dome. If it can get louder, it will be louder.”

Ernie Svolto, a New Jersey native, practiced inside at the Giants Stadium bubble before the state championship game.

Two other Bears actually shared their high school dome experience, with different outcomes: Amos Hall’s Cazenovia (N.Y.) High team defeated Boinske’s Notre Dame (Elmira, N.Y.) squad in the playoffs, also at the Carrier Dome.

“Every now and then I remind him,” Hall says with a chuckle. “When we played in the dome, there were only 5,000 people there, tops, and it was loud as heck.”

Hall says the fact that nearly all of the fans on Saturday won’t care for him and the Black Bears doesn’t concern him at all.

“It’s a fun experience. I’m looking forward to it,” Hall says. “It’s a rush no matter what they’re saying. It’s a rush.”

Playing indoors, just for kicks

Football players are used to inclement weather, of course, and most teams don’t use a little mud, or rain – or snow – as an excuse.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few who’d just as soon play inside all the time.

Meet the kickers.

Kicking coach Chris Binder said his two kickers, Chris Devinney and Mike Mellow, should enjoy the change of pace.

“The air in here’s dead. So there’s going to be no wind affecting any throws or kicks,” Binder said.

“I’m very happy for our two guys. I know they’re excited about the opportunity. Having kicked in Maine all year where it’s windy and cold, and where all the different natural environments play into it, this will be nice for them to hopefully have a great day in this kind of atmosphere.”

That feeling might be contagious: When Friday’s practice broke up, the UMaine kicking corps had swelled significantly as several defensive players took turns trying to boot a 30-yard field goal through the uprights.

Rob Kierstead, Marcus Walton, Dennis Dottin-Carter, and Lofa Tatupu took turns with a holder, with Tatupu splitting the uprights with distance to spare.

But not everything about the dome is perfect. The field is, after all, artificial turf.

“It’s gonna be turf-burn central is the term we’ve been using so far today,” David Cusano says. “It’s a little different from ours. [Ours has] got a little more give to it. It’s not as tight as this is.”

Svolto said the surface was “like sandpaper.” Boinske agreed.