When the University of Michigan football team takes the field to face rival Ohio State on Nov. 29, Michigan Stadium will be packed.

Throngs of people will be on the sidelines to watch kickoff, and among them will be a small but crucial group responsible for ensuring the stadium is ready to host “The Game.”

Kyle Kipke leads that group as facility manager for both Michigan Stadium and the adjoining Junge Family Champions Center.

When the placekicker tees up the football and the crowd roars as it’s booted through the air, Kipke will pause to savor the moment, which to him and his crew is the culmination of a week’s worth of heavy lifts and small details.

“Sometimes you have to stand back and soak it all in,” Kipke said. “When you’re here all day, it’s just like any other job. You come in Gate 9 and go into work, you don’t necessarily realize it every day until you run into somebody that’s at Gate 9 wanting to take pictures and saying, ‘This is my first time I’ve ever been here, this place is awesome.’

“That’s when you kind of sit back and say, ‘This is a cool place to work.’”

Leading up to the game, Kipke has limited time to savor much of anything. That’s because his team of five people bears much of the responsibility for ensuring Michigan Stadium is ready to host 110,000-plus fans, players and coaches for football games.

Kipke’s crew includes Morgan Petriko, associate facility manager; Scott Clayton and Rourke Barth, full-time facility specialists; and Ross Stofflet, part-time grounds. Together, they and dozens of student temporary workers from various schools are the reason the field is pristine, the trash and recycling bins are accessible and the ticket scanners at the gates are operational.

“I’m nothing without those guys,” Kipke said. “They work super hard and are really good at what they do so it makes my life a lot easier.”

Their work is both visible and invisible, much of it the kind of tasks no one thinks about until they are overlooked, but all of it helps create the kind of college football atmosphere fans are there to enjoy.

“We’re spot checking every little detail in the stadium because we keep saying this is somebody’s dream coming here to a gameday and we want to make sure that dream meets the expectation that they have when they get here,” Petriko said.

How it’s done

The playbook to pulling this off for each home game is fairly set, with inclement weather posing the greatest threat. Monday and Tuesday of game week involves most of the concourse set-up, including maneuvering barricades into place at each plaza and making sure the ticket scanner tents all have working lights and equipment.

In addition, they address any lingering maintenance issues from the previous event, such as broken door handles on suites or pictures that need to be hung.

They also ensure the concourse has ample bins for refuse. As a zero-waste facility, the Big House has hundreds of compost, recycle and landfill containers throughout, with some areas requiring more than others. Kipke’s team gets them where they need to be.

By midweek, the field starts to receive the attention, and that’s Barth’s wheelhouse. He will operate a large magnet up and down the field to pick up any loose metal and run a sweeper to pick up any trash. In addition, he’ll run a groomer on one of three settings depending on whether the FieldTurf surface is too hard or soft.

They also set out the pylons around the end zones, wrap the goal posts with pads and set up the coaches’ and players’ benches on the sideline, ensuring they are in their proper places and the heat/air-conditioning units there are operational as is the electrical equipment.

There is a sense of urgency attached to this work as it needs to be done before Friday when the visiting team and broadcast crews arrive. With only one tunnel to access the field, Kipke said it’s imperative his team has the bulk of its on-field work out of the way to ensure smooth ingress and egress for others who need to access the field.

Petriko, who came to U-M nine months ago by way of the Chicago Blackhawks’ practice facility, oversees the 30 student temporary workers from U-M, Eastern Michigan University, Concordia University, Lourdes University and the University of Toledo. Among their many tasks are charging the hundreds of batteries needed for the weapons detection devices, preparing ticket scanners and doing a lot of cleaning — “the little things you don’t think about,” Petriko said.

“They’re doing the stuff that helps out with strength in numbers,” Kipke said.

Once gameday arrives, the team can enjoy kickoff and respond to calls as the need arrives, such as a television remote not working or something spilling in a suite.

“We send them in as first reference to see if it’s actually a major spill or a small spill that can be cleaned up in five minutes by them. They’re kind of our lifeline and middleman in our operation,” Petriko said. “I tell my staff that we work so hard during the week to get things so set that when gameday happens, we barely have any calls.”

Kipke said Athletics has its own maintenance specialists on hand for major plumbing or electrical problems that crop up, but Clayton, Barth and Stofflet are available to address issues as well.

Once the game is over, the cleanup begins. U-M has a long-standing partnership with Father Gabriel Richard High School to bring 300-400 students into Michigan Stadium to sweep the bowl for trash that’s then destined for compost, recycle or landfill bins. JNS Cleaning Services also takes part in the cleanup process.

This football season featured no back-to-back home football games, although the Zach Bryan concert preceded a home game by a week — but last season started with five in a row, including marquee games against Texas and Southern California.

“That was seven days a week, so that was 35 straight days of working,” Kipke said of the stretch. “(Marquee games are) a totally different thing. More people, more logistics, more operations when you have those games. It was a grinder, that’s for sure.”

More than football

While Michigan football games are its most recognizable events, Michigan Stadium has also played host to professional soccer games, college and National Hockey League games, lacrosse, Commencement exercises and, as of Sept. 27, music concerts.

The latter might never have happened had Kipke’s team not found a crucial piece of equipment: a crane to build the stage that would sit at midfield.

“The X factor for the Zach Bryan concert was in August 2024, we weren’t sure if you could get a crane that could get down the tunnel because you needed a crane to build that structure. We found one and did a test run to get the crane through the tunnel.

“Once we figured out that we could get a crane down the tunnel, I’m sure there were other factors, but that was probably one of the main deciding factors of being able to have that done. Once that happened, the balls started rolling.”

Kipke said the operation for the concert went fairly smoothly, considering it was the first. But with the single tunnel, tasks like shuttling 150 port-a-potties onto the field took some communication and coordination.

Concert needs dictated that much of the parking lot near Crisler Center be roped off for their equipment and trailers. Those did not clear out until two days after the concert, leaving Kipke and his team a couple of days behind their usual stadium prep with a game that Saturday.

They also had to set up the goal posts that were removed for the concert and bring all the benches onto the field, tasks they would usually only do at the beginning of the season and not during it.

“The biggest thing was the field. Once they got all their concert stuff out, you’re just left with the field,” Kipke said. “There’s a lot of cleanup and field prep and getting the field back to football standards to safely play a football game on, so it was pretty time-consuming. I think we spent Wednesday and Thursday, 12-13 hours a day getting that field prepped.

“Overall, the concert went great. Was it a lot of work? Yes. Was it a lot of time? Yes. Was everybody tired? Yes. But overall, it went really well, and we got lots of positive feedback from it.”

There’s now a playbook Kipke and the team can look to and improve upon for when Morgan Wallen visits Michigan Stadium in July. The kicker is that this time it’s a two-day event, leaving little time to flip the stadium after the opening night, and considering the amount of trash bags collected after the Zach Bryan concert, it poses a challenge.

“We won’t be able to caddy everything on the field because all of the chairs will be in place so they’re going to have to take trash up to the concourses, but it’s easier to blow trash down than up,” Petriko said.

“On gameday, they do trash in the morning or at night so now a group is going to have to come in at 2 a.m. and get it up and ready to go. We’ll have to have staff to pull it out immediately…and we’re going to have to have everything wiped down. Usually things that take multiple days, we don’t have that.”

After football season, Kipke’s crew assists with events at Crisler to keep lots and sidewalks clear of snow and ice. The spring football game typically arrives in early or mid-April with Spring Commencement not that far behind. Right around then is the Big House 5k that finishes inside the stadium. During the summer, the team does landscaping, grounds, mowing and irrigation work until football season approaches.

With the last game Nov. 29 — and the opponent being Michigan’s biggest rival — Kipke said he’ll pause to reflect.

“The atmosphere of the stadium itself is more direct compared to other games. At least for me, I feel like the guys feel like it too, on gameday you’re a little more zoned in and dialed in on what you’re doing,” he said. “The energy of the building is just totally different that day.

“I’m always looking around, ‘Wow, this small-time guy from Onsted is out here right in the thick of everything and I’ve got my hands in all this stuff.’”

Tags:

• Athletics
• concerts
• football
• Michigan Stadium