Few people have spent as much time in Beaver Stadium as Bobby White. A defensive lineman on the Lions’ 1982 and 1986 national championship teams and later an assistant coach, he has managed the stadium’s club seats and suites for the last 24 years.
He just doesn’t get to see much of the action on Saturdays.

“Every once in a while, we’ll get a really big game here, and people get so absorbed in the game, it gets quiet enough that you too can watch it,” says White ’86 Lib, ’93 MEd Edu. “But that doesn’t always happen.”

Back in the ’80s, White and his teammates affectionately referred to the stadium as “the big gray battleship,” and over the years he’s gotten to know it inside and out. His first year at his current job was 2001, the first year that Penn State offered any sort of premium seating for football. He says one of the challenges was getting people used to that idea, but that the demand for those seats “has maintained a very healthy status over these last 15 or so years.” White split his time evenly between the chair-backed club seats and climate-controlled luxury suites on home Saturdays during the first few years, but more recently he has spent more time helping older patrons get from the parking lots to those seats as well. Occasionally, he’ll get a request to get the cheerleaders and the Nittany Lion mascot up to one of the suites to sing “Happy Birthday” to a young fan.

By 2027, when the current renovation is complete, the stadium is expected to include 34 loge boxes, 4,500 new club seats, and between 26 and 30 new suites, all on the west side. The existing 4,000 club seats and 60 suites will remain in place on the south and east sides of the stadium and, as with the new suites, will be purposed for more than football. White has overseen a wide variety of private events in the suites and club seat sections since 2002. The initial idea was to hold 30 exclusively paid events a year, he says, but between meetings, dinners, banquets, weddings, and high school proms, that annual number quickly swelled to 150. “My hunch tells me that’s about to be blown out of the water,” White says, “because you’ll have twice the space.”