The night lights went on - pics from 1989 | The Boneyard

The night lights went on - pics from 1989

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UConn played its first night game at the old Memorial Field (right behind Gampel, which you can see dominating the backgroud) in 1989, beating UNH.

I still have the t-shirt that says "I was there when the lights went on!" from that game :)

Here are a couple of pics from that night:

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I've posted a few photos from men's senior night basketball game from the dream season (1989-90).

Check out the pics (in the first 2 pages) here:
 
I wish I still had my "Hut One Hut Two Let There Be Lights" shirt from mid 90s. No idea who the opponent was as I was likely drunk...
 
wow. thank u for sharing, so cool to see the history. kind of hard to imagine a whole stadium on the werth basketball site, but i'm well aware of memorial stadium, although i became a fan decades after the move to the rent. I sincerely hope that UConn football will find a way to survive long enough to return to financial & competitive health, get in a sensible conference and get a modern stadium on campus.

in spite of the "history" with the big east, a flagship state university (FBS level) belongs with its university peers (rutgers/penn state/maryland/UVA/West Virginia) - not an assortment of exclusively private, catholic institutions. And that flagship state university should have a proper football stadium on campus, to anchor its athletic facilities.
 
time to bring football back on campus!!
high quality GIF


(I'm a fan of the idea in concept. But as things stand now we have neither the demand nor the money to make that happen. That may not always be the case though. In the meantime, we are fortunate to have Rentschler field.
 
Speaking of night games against UNH at Memorial Stadium, does anyone remember the game in 1995 (I think) where UNH appeared to make a game winning FG on the last play of the game only to have it overturned about 15 minutes later by the officials who ruled the play did not get off in time? It took so long to get the decision that people were leaving without knowing who won.
 
This was the first home night game. The week before this, we possibly played the first night game in UConn history at SMU in Dallas. I was there.
I remember that game. I watched it from my dorm room. We had that game won, but ran out of gas
 
Thanks for all the photos and memories!

I was born in ‘88 but I remember my dad taking me to a UConn football game in the mid-90s. All I still remember is looking across the field at Gampel and how packed the stands seemed. Wish I’d been old enough to experience it properly! I still hope we can bring football back to campus one day …
 
Two good UConn teams mentioned in this thread. Not surprisingly they had two of the best UConn QBs not named Orlovsky. And top RBs too.
 
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Ah, Memorial Stadium. Great photos.

One of my fondest UConn memories took place there mid 1960s and it had zero to do with football. I was a candidate for Student Senate (i won) and the early morning of election day about 5 of us in my party hopped the fence, our car parked behind the field house, climbed to the top of the high side of the stadium and taped on a huge banner telling people to vote for our party. You could see it from a good chunk of central campus As we finished, we could see a campus security car that seemed to coming from Hillside toward us . We scrambled down the 60 rows of seats, ran to hop the fence to the car but the security guy arrived before we could leave. He asked what we were doing - duh- and asked for our names without asking for our IDs. One of our group, obviously the brightest, quickly gave the name of someone from our opposing party. The rest of us follewed suit. He wrote the names and let us go without telling us to remove the banner which stayed for several hours before wind tore it down.

I missed few games there even though we weren’t very good - did beat Yale for the first time my junior year. The team slogan could have been “We might be small, but we are slow, too”.
 
I and a couple of friends were among the first tenants at the brand new, beautiful Celeron Square apartments.

A year later we all moved to the grad dorms. Celeron Square offices in the early days were in a small office on Rte 195 just off campus.

I was too lazy to collect my deposit for the apartment and I used to call their office to get the recording for their office hours. I was a grad student and used to spend late nights in the lab and called them in the middle of the night a few times. It was always a recording and I always planned to go the next day, which I never did.

One late night, several months (may be even a year later) after I left the apartment, somebody answered the phone, and I panicked and hung up the phone. I thought I dialed a wrong number or something changed at the office.

A few weeks later there was a note on my dorm room from the police dept asking me to stop by at the police station. Not knowing what the issue was, I was slightly apprehensive. An officer sat me down in a room and asked (interrogated) me for about 20 minutes. He asked me if I called people in the night, if I stayed up, if I ever made prank calls, etc. I had absolutely no clue what he was talking about, I had totally forgotten that call to Celeron Sq and never thought much about it. I told him several of us grad students spent late nights in the lab, often staying up all night, and we routinely called each other in the night. My first reaction was one of my friends made a complaint about late night calls.

Finally he asked me if I knew 429-3627 (I am good at remembering numbers) and I immediately told him that's the number for Celeron Square apartments and I had called them a few times and about my deposit.

He let me go and told me that the manager at the time was receiving lots of prank calls and that they were from South Africa. And also that the office phone now moved into the resident manager's house at the apartments.
 

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