Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

The smallest stadium in Division I football took twenty-six years and a fifty-million-dollar gift to finish. Cooper Field sits in the heart of the Georgetown University campus in Washington, DC, bordered by W Road NW above the Potomac, and began life in 1994 as Harbin Field, a modest grass soccer ground. When safety concerns closed the old Kehoe Field in 2002, Hoyas football moved in, and a 22-million-dollar conversion designed by Hughes Group Architects broke ground in April 2005 under the placeholder name Multi-Sport Field - a project whose grand double-decked plans were suspended that same fall, leaving temporary bleachers one university official called an eyesore standing for fifteen years. The turnaround came in 2015, when Georgetown football parents Peter and Susan Cooper gave 50 million dollars - among the largest gifts in university history - funding the Cooper Athletics Leadership Program and the completion of the stadium renamed in their honour. Construction through 2018 and 2019 delivered permanent grandstands, restrooms, concessions and a proper concourse, finished in the strange quiet of September 2020 with the campus emptied by the pandemic; final site work wrapped by 2022 alongside the new Thompson Athletic Center. The finished ground seats around 3,750 on artificial turf - still the smallest full-time stadium in Division I's FBS or FCS ranks, a distinction the Patriot League program wears without embarrassment - and serves as home to Georgetown football and the university's nationally ranked men's and women's lacrosse teams, with field hockey and campus recreation filling the calendar. Few American college stadiums have a better view: the field sits below the business school with the Potomac River and the Virginia skyline beyond the south stands, folded into a hilltop campus older than the republic's capital itself - a small stadium that took the long way to completion and landed somewhere worth the wait.