{"id":19963,"date":"2014-12-22T10:48:30","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T16:48:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=19963"},"modified":"2015-10-28T00:54:20","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T05:54:20","slug":"vaught-hemingway-stadium-expansion-announced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/vaught-hemingway-stadium-expansion-announced\/","title":{"rendered":"Vaught-Hemingway Stadium Expansion Announced"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">University, Miss. (TLV) \u2013 <strong>The Rebels<\/strong> are moving Forward Together. But never forgetting No. 38. A new stadium expansion will officially allow for 64,038.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">After a nine-win regular season that saw <strong>Ole Miss<\/strong> defeat No. 1 <strong>Alabama<\/strong> and No. 4 <strong>Mississippi State<\/strong>, Athletics Director<strong> Ross Bjork<\/strong> went on the offensive.<\/span><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_19965\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-19965\" style=\"width: 600px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/VaughtArtistRendering.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-19965 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/VaughtArtistRendering.jpg?resize=600%2C451\" alt=\"VaughtArtistRendering\" width=\"600\" height=\"451\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/VaughtArtistRendering.jpg?w=600&amp;ssl=1 600w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/VaughtArtistRendering.jpg?resize=300%2C226&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-19965\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Artist&#8217;s rendering of the expected Vaught-Hemingway expansion<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">Just days after a 31\u201317 Egg Bowl victory, Ole Miss announced a contract extension and raise that will keep <strong>Hugh Freeze<\/strong> and his staff in Oxford for the next four years. Freeze\u2019s salary was increased from $3 million to $4.3 million per year.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">Just two weeks removed from that announcement, Bjork unveiled plans for a new north end zone that will bowl-in <strong>Vaught-Hemingway Stadium<\/strong> and increase capacity to over 64,000. Construction on the north end zone is scheduled to begin in December of 2015 and be ready for the start of the 2016 season.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">Plans call for a new video board that stretches an astonishing 104 feet wide and stands 94 feet tall. For reference, the <strong>Aggies<\/strong> of <strong>Texas A&amp;M<\/strong> currently house the largest video board in college football. It takes up a total of 7,661 square feet. The Rebels board will engulf 9,776 square feet, roughly 25 percent larger.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">Bjork said that two 30 x 50 foot video boards will be placed in the south end zone project, which includes 770 club level seats and 30 luxury suites to be ready for the beginning of the 2015 season.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\">At the conclusion of the project, Vaught-Hemingway will be the largest stadium in Mississippi. The student section will move into the new north end zone in 2016, increasing its capacity to 10,000.\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"25\" height=\"16\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-14544\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/TheLocalVoiceLigature-25web.jpg?resize=25%2C16\" alt=\"The Local Voice Ligature\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">&#8211;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\">This article was originally printed in <em>The Local Voice<\/em> #219 (published December 18, 2014).<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #0000ff;\">To download a PDF of this issue, <a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.payloadz.com\/go\/sip?id=2805100\">click here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>University, Miss. (TLV) \u2013 The Rebels are moving Forward Together. But never forgetting No. 38. A new stadium<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":236,"featured_media":19964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,6],"tags":[41,7067,4,700,1470,655,790,699,4033],"class_list":["post-19963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-athletics","category-ole-miss","tag-hugh-freeze","tag-ole-miss","tag-oxford","tag-rebels","tag-ross-bjork","tag-university-of-mississippi","tag-vaught","tag-vaught-hemingway","tag-vaught-hemingway-stadium"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/VaughtFEAT.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/236"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}