Rice Football Venue Renamed: Owls Ink Stadium Rights Deal, Introduce First Community Stadium

The home venue for Rice Football games has acquired a new name. The Owls will unveil First Community Stadium this week.

Under the leadership of interim athletic director Eric George, Rice Athletics has agreed to a new stadium naming rights deal. For the first time in its history, Historic Rice Stadium will have an on-field sponsorship: First Community Credit Union.

According to the agreement, the facility will now be referred to as First Community Stadium.

“It’s a perfect name because it really captures what we want the stadium to mean,” Rice President Reginald DesRoches said on Thursday. “It’s obviously going to host football and other sports, but it’s also a part of the community, especially with the Gateway Project and how we’re going to connect to West U and that community. It worked out well that the name really represents what we want the stadium to be.”

The turf was modified this week to incorporate the new sponsorship. No additional branding is displayed on the stadium at this time, but future signage will be considered as renovations progress. For now, the new mark will be unveiled during the Owls’ next home game, Saturday, October, against UTSA, which is also Families Weekend

The deal is a win for the program on multiple fronts. First, it’s a financial boost which will bolster the Owls’ continued upward aspirations in the ever-evolving arms race that is college sports in the modern era. Second, that advantage came without sacrificing the symbolism and status of a historic stadium.

“Everything that’s happened here doesn’t get lost because the name changes. This place, the university, the stadium itself, is still where we hosted the Super Bowl, where we hosted JFK’s speech, all the memories of the teams playing here don’t change because the name does,” interim Athletic Director Eric George said.

“It wasn’t just slapping a name on the side [of the stadium]. It was finding a true partner that was going to help make us better and take us to the next level. Obviously, there’s a lot of emotion tied to a name change, but everybody that was concerned about that felt really at ease that this was going to be something to elevate the university as a whole and not just an attempt to grab some money and lose who we were in the process.”

First Community Stadium is as inviting a namesake as could have been imagined and one that the casual observer might not even attribute to a larger corporation. Instead, it’s a welcoming message that dovetails quite nicely with the ongoing Gateway Project and the Owls’ plans to connect the University to the Rice Village and the greater Houston community.

TJ Tijerina, president and CEO of First Community, echoed those sentiments. “It’s not as much about the name on the stadium as it is the relationship with Rice University,” he said. Sharing that there are plans in place to engage the student body and faculty with financial literacy assistance and more. Both he and the Rice administration used the term “partnership” throughout their opening remarks.

The deal is for a 20-year extended term and will carry over when the Gateway Project begins and the renovations to the stadium and surrounding exterior are complete.