Kelly/Shorts Stadium

The stadium sits in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. The turf is artificial, and the yard lines mark out a rectangle that holds the community’s attention every autumn evening. The stands rise steeply from the sidelines, and on match days the space fills until it is difficult to see the sky above the crowd.

The ground opened in 1972 as Perry Shorts Stadium, named for an alumnus and board member. The name changed in June 1983 when the trustees added Kenneth “Bill” Kelly’s name, the head coach who led the team from 1951 to 1966. The playing field itself received another honour in September 2022, renamed Kramer/Deromedi Field after Roy Kramer and Herb Deromedi, the two coaches who followed Kelly. The stadium kept the Kelly/Shorts title.

Specs and capacity figures are often debated, so the focus stays on what happens inside the fence. The crowd reached 35,127 on September 8, 2012, for a game against the Michigan State University Spartans. That number set a record that still stands. The pitch has seen several revisions over the years: original Astroturf gave way to FieldTurf in 2004, and in 2016 the surface switched again to AstroTurf’s PowerBase GEN1 system. The stands fill until the ground falls silent only when the final whistle blows.