STANFORD, Calif. — In the wake of the announcement that Stanford was planning to build a new, $50 million softball stadium, coach Jessica Allister was on cloud nine. This kind of investment in softball is rare, and she felt fortunate that the university was showing this commitment to her program.

Allister had seen other refurbishments or upgrades around the country before and, in those cases, construction would usually start as soon as the season ended and last about nine months, in time for the following season — or at least by the time conference play begins.

She was under the impression Stanford’s timeline would be similar. Then came a meeting about the facility’s construction in January of 2023.

“I can actually vividly remember the meeting that we were going into,” Allister told ESPN. My administrator at the time looked at me and said, ‘I think we’re going to get some news you’re not going to like today.'”

Sure enough, he was right. The scope of the project was too large to be able to complete construction during the offseason, meaning Stanford softball would be without a home field for the 2025 season.

“My initial thoughts were, ‘Alright, they’re building you a $50 million stadium, there’s going to be some bumps and bruises along the way, so that’s okay,'” she said. “And then my next thought was this is somebody’s senior year and this is also 25% of most of the student-athletes’ Stanford experience on our campus, and we need to find a way to make sure that it can be as good as it possibly can be.”

Stanford administrators work-shopped some possibilities, including playing entirely on the road for the 2025 season, whether that was true road games or becoming a tenant at a nearby school — like Santa Clara or San Jose State — for home games. But Allister was adamant those were not acceptable solutions.

Stanford’s athletic complex is one of the biggest in college sports, so the focus shifted toward figuring out a place on campus to have a temporary field.

“You need a public address, you need some sort of bleachers. It’d be really nice if you have a scoreboard, video board, all these pieces. And we were looking all over campus, how could this work?” said Dan Levine, an associate athletics director for facilities. “We looked at some of our smaller facilities and as we were talking, I remember being on Google Maps and looking at the size of the softball field and saying, ‘I think we might be able to drop it in the stadium.'”

The stadium, in this case, was the football stadium.

“We all looked at each other, and is this even possible?” Levine said.

Turns out, it was. There was just enough room to fit a field that met all the NCAA-required criteria, so it was just a matter of logistics. They would have to wait for the end of the football season and have a vendor lined up to install a dirt field, protective netting, a warning track, a fence and other details to meet the standard of a Division I softball stadium.

“I think it was [athletic director Bernard Muir] who said, ‘Jess, we’ve got it. You’re playing in the football stadium,’ and my jaw dropped,” Allister said. “And I’m like, ‘Really?’ And then he said, ‘Yeah, think about it. You got the grass, we’ve got the stands, we have the scoreboard, we’ve got the music, we’ve got the, I mean the concessions, the bathrooms, everything for the game day experience is there, the lights. They need new sod anyway, we’ll skin it, put it in an infield, build it out, play in the football stadium.'”

At first, Allister said she wasn’t completely convinced. If she was handing out a grade, it would have been a B-minus.

“Then as it all got built out and it came to life, it became a solid A-plus,” she said. “It’s just been absolutely phenomenal and beyond anything that I could have imagined.”

On Saturday, when Stanford hosts rival Cal (4 p.m. ET on ACC Extra), the school will try to break the single-game NCAA softball attendance record of 12,566, which was set last year at the Women’s College World Series in Oklahoma City.

“It feels like you have to do it, right? We’ll never play in a football stadium again, I don’t think,” Allister said. “And nobody else is playing in the football stadium. So, it just is this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it seemed like obviously something that we needed to try.”

Over the past year, when Allister told people the team was playing in the football stadium this season, the first thing they asked about was logistics.

“Then their next question is, so when are you going to try to sell it out?” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Well, we’ll see.’ But the Cal series feels like a natural fit. Two Bay Area teams seems really obvious. Two great softball teams. It’s going to be a beautiful time of the year on a Saturday afternoon. It’s perfect timing.”

The dimensions are a little different than what Stanford had been accustomed to. Down the right-field line, the fence is just 192 feet, which is two feet over the NCAA minimum and about 20 feet shallower than the Cardinal’s right-field line in its permanent home. Stanford has hit 35 home runs at home so far this season, which is tied for the 13th-most in the nation.

“We’re hitting a lot of home runs on this field, for sure,” said outfielder Caelan Koch, who is a graduate senior. “It’s been awesome.”

Koch said the players on the team have appreciated the extra effort into making this season memorable as the new facility is being built.

“Other schools most likely wouldn’t have done this and we would’ve had to play on the road almost all season,” she said. “So we were really excited to be able to play at home and have our own field and it’s just a really cool thing.”