Rendering courtesy of HNTB
Specialty coatings on Northwestern University’s new Ryan Field made the job site safer and will protect the underside of the deck from weather conditions.
In football, offense and defense earn glory when teams win big games.
But special teams put your favorite squad over the top. The players who spend only about 20 percent of the time on the field executing punts, kickoffs, and field goals can be the difference between a victory and a loss.
New Millennium’s “special teams” helped land one of the most historic construction projects in college sports. Earlier this year, New Millennium earned the opportunity to be the deck provider on Northwestern University’s Ryan Field construction project — primarily because of its specialty coating capabilities.
Once complete, the 35,000-seat structure in Evanston, Illinois, will house 12,000 tons of steel. A combination of architectural and standard roof deck supplied by New Millennium was used on a sweeping canopy structure, which required specialty paint coatings. These coatings helped Northwestern avoid painting the deck on the job site after installation – and the related additional field labor and schedule.
Along with the canopy, New Millennium metal decking was used in the steel bowl of the stadium, coupled with precast concrete wall panels and integrated stadium seating systems. These elements create improved sightlines, acoustics, and environmental sustainability.
Once completed, Northwestern University’s new Ryan Field will feature 12,000 tons of steel, including composite and standard roof deck supplied by New Millennium for a sweeping canopy.
With a reported $862 million price tag, Ryan Field will be the most expensive stadium in NCAA history. The stadium is scheduled to be ready for the start of the 2026 season.
Ryan Field will host concerts, community events, and non-football programming along with Wildcats home football games.
New Millennium is supplying product for:
New Millennium has plenty of experience applying specialty coatings on roof deck used in sports arenas. The roof deck used at Globe Life Field, home of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers, is also specially coated to ensure ballplayers can see fly balls.
This drawing shows the layout of the composite deck used for the main concourse of Ryan Field.
On a high-profile project like Ryan Field, deck coatings offer two benefits: protection from the elements and elevated safety.
LeJeune Steel Company – the structural steel fabricator for Ryan Field – brought New Millennium into the planning stages early on to collaborate on the design of the steel structure. Initially, the Butler, Indiana, facility was set to manufacture all the deck.
Once the engineers at Butler took a deep dive into the specs for the job, they realized the canopy roof required the specialty coating team at the New Millennium Memphis, Tennessee, facility.
Skyler Luthi supervised the estimators at the Memphis plant during the Ryan Field project. He refers to that facility as New Millennium’s “Architectural Division,” because of it capabilities producing architectural decking and supporting large-scale, meticulous projects.
“The Butler team saw the conditions and brought us in because of our expertise in areas that the competitors don’t have,” Luthi said. “The metal decking we manufacture serves structural and architectural intents. We look at architectural documents and specifications because there is buried information we must hunt for.”
This hunt produced opportunities to show off New Millennium’s capabilities to apply specialty coatings to an aesthetically pleasing roof deck for a roof canopy that would serve as an eye-catching architectural focal point.
For the main canopy roof, the specs called for 3.5” Versa-Dek® dovetail. The dovetail deck provides a clean, smooth, linear plank ceiling visual while concealing side-lap and fastener penetrations. When Northwestern fans look up from the action on the field, they’ll see only the cream-colored coatings used to protect the deck for decades to come.
Those coatings aren’t just eye candy. Luthi said they also protect the roof deck from the elements.
New Millennium applied the VersaClad30 system. This system is a Polyvinylidene Difluoride (PVDF) application.
Versa-Clad 30 is used primarily on outdoor venues exposed to the elements, including UV exposure. PPG Industries – the private label manufacturer of Versa-Clad 30 – offers a 30-year warranty on this coating system.
This coating system is not innovative in and of itself – the fact it is being applied to the underside of the roof, where there is minimal exposure to UV rays, is a unique application for the product. This portion of the roof will be better equipped to handle the Midwest’s humid summers and blistering cold winters.
New Millennium is one of the few applicators who offer a triple-pass coating system, according to Luthi – another differentiator from the competition. For this system, the first coating is a urethane primer, followed by a PVDF coat to give the deck its color. The clear PVDF coat that is applied last provides decades of protection.
From there, the Memphis facility rolls and forms the steel into its Versa-Dek® profiles. New Millennium then meticulously packages the deck to ensure the coated segments are not damaged during transport.
“We stack the deck by hand with a paper inner leaf to protect the coating system during transit,” Luthi said. “Typically, with other profiles, you could just run an automatic stacker, and it just goes and goes and goes. But with architectural deck, it takes an additional white-glove approach.”
Safety is the most important benefit of factory-applied coatings. Luthi said applying coatings to the roof deck in a controlled environment means field personnel do not have to set up scaffolding for overhead painting at stadium heights, eliminating a huge onsite safety risk.
“You want to avoid safety issues that involve painting the deck up in the air,” Luthi said. “The labor that’s involved in setting up scaffolding and paying someone to be out there to paint from overhead – it’s an enormous task. So, when you can coat the deck in a controlled environment in the factory, you make it safer for the people in the field.”
An issue with the Ryan Field foundation allowed New Millennium to send pre-cut sheets of deck instead of long sheets requiring field cutting, eliminating down time on-site.
Much like a running back who dashes by would-be tacklers, one of New Millennium’s greatest attributes is its ability to adjust on the fly. Stadium projects like Ryan Field require this agility, and the company managed to show off this capability in a few ways.
Early in the project, the foundation wall of the stadium was dug out further away from where it originally was planned. LeJeune decided to start laying out sheets of deck from New Millennium. However, Project Lead Scott Sliva realized they would not have enough decking on hand to work with.
This foundation issue turned into a silver lining for New Millennium. Due to the increased span distance to the foundation wall, New Millennium could send longer sheets that were pre-cut to size instead of sheets that required to be field cut in half.
Most importantly, it meant there would be no downtime in the field.
“Because they weren’t using two for one at that point, that meant that I knew they were going to run out a lot faster,” Sliva said. “I would explain to our customer service people that we can send this bit out there, and we’ll replace that in that next shipment when it goes. They won’t miss a beat.”
The canopy at Ryan Field required meticulous segmentation of tight interior corners to create the implied curvature of the deck.
New Millennium was put to the test on a surprise request to help shape the canopy. The inner and outer edges of the canopy roof required a segmented deck edge cut to within ⅛” min to ¼” max tolerance from the grid arc creating a rounded look.
Sliva responded by marking up his CAD drawings down to these precise measurements so the field team could cut the deck onsite to create the implied curvature in the roof deck. He added so many lines to the points that required such precision; the drawings looked more like GPS coordinates when he was done.
The challenging part of this fix was the inner corners of the stadium. Sliva said he had to cut some segments down to less than a foot. And all of this had to be accomplished in time for field crews to move on to the next section. Fortunately, the crew started with the sideline panels, which Sliva said the deck edge was flatter than the others, making the segments longer and the adjustments less severe.
“I was able to do the two sidelines, then the end zones, and then finally came back into the corners, because they were the hardest part,” Sliva said. “Eventually I figured out all you do is start to take the segment length and then divide it in half until it gets you within the tolerance. I divided the segment in half again, then divided it in half again until I got it down between an eighth and a quarter of an inch. I also tried to keep in mind limiting the number of segments for those in the field doing the actual cutting.”
Working on the most expensive NCAA football stadium in history provides plenty of lessons. Sliva took the opportunity to expose some of the junior members of his crew how CAD drawings become reality by bringing them to the Ryan Field job site to see their products in action.
“If you haven’t seen it in the field, you don’t understand the scale or the weight of these materials, so it’s hard to visualize it,” he said.
Sliva’s goal for these site visits is to show how his crew’s drawing layout decisions impact the job site.
“I think it really impacts how you think about a deck layout,” Sliva said. “It changes you because you understand there are people trying to carry 150-pound sheets in the air tied to a tether, and it impacts the way you detail.”
On-the-job training at a historic venue is always a nice benefit for those new to the profession.
“I think stadiums are always adventure,” Sliva said. “They are always different. There is always some challenge with them that makes them unique.”
When assembling a winning team, you want players who bring as many skillsets to the roster as possible. New Millennium brought specialty coating expertise and the ability to adapt to changes on the fly to the Ryan Field squad. As a result, the Wildcats’ new home will be the talk of the Big Ten for years to come.
We can’t wait to see Ryan Field filled with the Northwestern faithful in 2026.
Storm shelters are necessities that can account 10 to 20 percent of a project’s budget. Composite joist and deck solutions can turn these structures into cost-effective multipurpose facilities.
Successful indoor pool design and construction must address challenges unique to these large open spaces. An all-encompassing answer …
Building a better steel experience
