On a sweltering morning in late June, Dwayne Rush led a couple of visitors on a tour of the bustling construction site that dominates the west side of Beaver Stadium. Climbing the recently poured concrete steps that will eventually provide fans a path to the main concourse and club level, he pointed out areas of recent progress and shared details about the project, such as the number of workers on-site—a few over 200 on an average day, but as many as 500 over the next two years for what will ultimately be the largest-ever construction project at University Park. The soon-to-be-installed temporary bleachers, 32 rows in all, that would go up for the duration of the 2025 football season. Or the on-site countdown clock that marked the days until the Aug. 30 season opener.

“When it got under 100,” Rush jokes, “I developed a tic.”

As the project manager overseeing the nearly $700 million renovation for the Office of Physical Plant, Rush ’87 Eng knows the site better than anyone. There’s not a detail of the massive undertaking that he’s not aware of and ultimately responsible for, and his long career as a civil engineer has prepared him for the role. But the experience that makes him uniquely qualified to appreciate the project’s full impact—and what the building’s evolution means to those who fill it on fall Saturdays—doesn’t show up on his résumé.

For that, you’d need to go back four decades, to the mid-1980s, a time when Rush had a very different—but in some ways no less essential—role at the stadium. Back then, he answered to “Doo-Rod,” a nickname specific to the cohort with whom he spent most of his time. From 1983 to 1986, Rush was a student manager for the Nittany Lion football team; in his final season, he served as co-head-manager during the Lions’ run to the 1986 national championship. He’s one of a handful of lettermen from that era still connected to the program (including former team captain Bobby White ’86 Lib, ’93 MEd Edu; see sidebar, p. 42), and almost certainly the only person with both a thorough field-level knowledge of the game-day experience and the 30,000-foot, 107,000-seat perspective on the renovation that is bringing Beaver Stadium into the future.

“When this is over,” says Don Carlino ’85 Bus, his fellow student manager and longtime friend, “he’s going to have to stand back and pinch himself. He’s going to have the most incredible life experience—from where he started, to what he’s done, and where it finished.”

For Rush, it started in his hometown of Phillipsburg, N.J., about three hours from State College. He was an unremarkable high school athlete—a “backup backup” on the football team, he says—but a solid student. Once Rush had made his college choice, his coach, who used to attend football camps hosted by the Penn State staff, asked if he’d ever thought of being an equipment manager once he got to Happy Valley. Rush says it hadn’t even occurred to him that that would be an option.

In the spring of 1983, as his senior year wound down, Rush wrote a letter to Tim Shope, then the Lions’ head equipment manager, expressing his interest in joining the team. Months went by with no response. “I said, OK, I guess they don’t need me, whatever,” Rush says. “I didn’t really give it much thought.” That changed on July 1, when he got a letter from University Park. The message: “Welcome to the Penn State football family,” and a request to be on campus by noon on Aug. 1, ready to start preseason camp.

“They never called me, never interviewed me,” Rush says. “I had just graduated high school in the middle of June, so I thought I had a solid two months of summer vacation. It got cut short by about three weeks.”

Rush pulled in to State College as requested in time for preseason camp and met the other managers when they gathered at the East Area Locker Room building. Among his fellow new arrivals was Brad Caldwell ’86 H&HD, soon to be better known by friends—and eventually by Penn State football fans everywhere—as Spider. “It was a great group of guys, a good mix of people from different backgrounds,” Rush says now. “Most of the group had played some sort of sports growing up, and we all had the same kind of likes. We all just fell right in together.”

Rush remembers that first summer, like every summer after it, as a grind—living on a mostly empty campus, working two-a-days for a couple of weeks, up at 6:30 every morning and working until 10 most nights. For players and managers alike, camp was exhausting—and, looking back, probably the best part of the job. “I should’ve enjoyed it more,” Rush says. “For three weeks, you did nothing but football. We had the campus and town to ourselves, we were together all the time. You’re in the equipment room all day, and maybe you’d look for a hiding spot where you could take a half-hour nap. But then we’d go back to the dorm at night and play poker. It was just us, the team, and the coaches.”

That togetherness meant the managers had no choice but to get to know each other. Carlino, two years ahead of the newbies and a savvy veteran by comparison, takes credit for giving Rush his nickname; more than 40 years later, Caldwell says, “We all pretty much just call him ‘Doo.’” As for those first-year managers, Carlino figured out early on that Caldwell and Rush complemented each other. “I learned quickly that Spider makes up for a lack of stature with his personality,” he says of Caldwell, whose distinctive posture from a childhood bout with scoliosis inspired his nickname. Rush, he says, is “more of a behind-the-scenes guy—organized, fastidious, more of a doer. An engineering type.”

Not just an engineering “type,” of course—a civil engineering major from his first day on campus. Even today, Carlino and Caldwell are still unsure how Rush managed it.

“We worked 50 hours a week in the fall,” Carlino says.

Adds Caldwell, “I was always amazed: How do you do this job and have this major?”

On one level, it’s a simple answer: Rush had a reliable bicycle and put it to good use. In season, the managers were expected back at the East Area Locker Room anytime they had consecutive open class periods during the day. For Rush, who spent most of his class time in Hammond and Sackett on the west end of campus, that meant lots of cross-campus pedaling to help sort laundry or prep for practice. He managed to keep a solid GPA; he says he learned early to balance the time commitment required to maintain his grades and pull his weight as a manager.

The job itself evolved year by year. For practices and games, freshman managers were dubbed “running water” due to their primary responsibility of keeping players hydrated. Duties expanded slightly for sophomores, juniors graduated to working as ballboys, and seniors mostly had supervisory roles. The work was never glamorous but generally pretty tolerable, and the benefits made it all worthwhile. The friendships that would become lifelong. The big wins, particularly in an era when there were so many. And really, every moment they had a chance to be on the field: Rush’s first game as a student manager was also the first college football game he ever attended; his last was the 1987 Fiesta Bowl.

When Rush graduated the following May, he had every reason to think he’d already put the perfect ending on his Penn State story. Sure, he’d be an alum—he became a life member of the Alumni Association not long after graduation—and he’d always be a fan of the football program. But wherever the rest of his life took him, it didn’t figure to have much to do with those four memorable years in Beaver Stadium.

Rush spent the first 25 years of his career working in industry, including stints with the State College–based Shaner Hotel Group and construction firm Gilbane Building. While at Gilbane, which did extensive work with the university, he led projects for several construction jobs at University Park, including work on the Business and Law School buildings. “In the back of my mind,” he admits,” I always thought it would be cool to come back and work at Penn State.” The opportunity finally came in 2012, and over the next decade, Rush primarily oversaw projects affiliated with the College of Engineering, including construction of the ECoRE Building on West Campus and the Chemical and Bioengineering Building, and renovations to Steidle Building.

In the spring of 2023, Rush was offered the opportunity to focus on athletics projects—and one massive project in particular. After years of feasibility studies on how to modernize Beaver Stadium, and at what cost, there was a scope of work and a realistic budget. “Within two months of starting, we were interviewing architects,” he says.

His friends know how much it means to Rush. Other than a brief departure about a decade ago, Caldwell never left Happy Valley. Not long after graduation, he joined the football staff as equipment manager, a role he held until 2014; he came back in 2015 to help manage Beaver Stadium clubs and suites, and his office sits almost directly above the home locker room. Naturally, he was among the first to hear of Rush’s new gig. “When it was coming to fruition, he said, ‘Spider, guess what? I think they’re going to put me in charge of the stadium,’” Caldwell says. “He was really excited.”

“Excited and nervous,” Carlino adds with a laugh. “He’s still nervous.”

Planning and preparation transformed into action on a cold night last December, when workers began dismantling the west side of the stadium mere hours after the Lions’ on-field dismantling of SMU in the opening round of the College Football Playoff. (Rush is rooting for another deep playoff run this season, but he’s hoping it includes only neutral bowl game sites: Hosting that game delayed the start of the demolition by about three weeks.) Other than some weekends and holidays, or temporary stoppages when there’s lightning in the area, work on the site has continued almost daily since.

The size and stakes of the project combine to make it a daunting challenge, but for Rush, nothing looms larger than that first immovable deadline: “The first game of the season,” he says. “We have to be ready.” The budget is 2 ½ times that of any project he’s previously overseen. And then there’s the huge number of stakeholders, something he couldn’t grasp until he was immersed in the job. He’s been working with broadcast partners to understand angles for the temporary lighting that will be in place this fall. And he’s connected with the various agencies for which the dozen antennae atop the now-demolished press box—cellular, state police, emergency response, and many more—must be accounted. “If you’re taking it down, you have to find a place to put it back up,” he says. “It was a learning curve.”

These are things he never had to ponder back when he was running water and corralling footballs at field level. Something else he didn’t consider much back then: history. Rush remembers showing up as a freshman and assuming that the stadium he stepped into in the mid-1980s had been unchanged since, well, forever. Now, he says, “I’ve seen the drawings, and learned that a certain piece was only constructed two years before I got here.” He knows that the ingenious expansion that involved cutting the stadium bleachers into sections, raising them on jacks, and adding concrete seating at field level took place in 1978, just five years before he arrived on campus. He remembers that even when he was a student, the stadium’s much smaller footprint allowed fans to pull their cars right up to the structure on the east side, so that they actually tailgated underneath the overhanging upper decks.

All of this puts into perspective the work he’s overseeing now—a renovation whose final form is hard to envision, but will soon enough be the stadium fans experience for decades to come. He knows that this dramatic stage in the stadium’s evolution is just that—a stage, the latest of many for a building that has morphed and expanded to account for the growth of the program and the sport’s constantly shifting ground.

He also understands that for all the new concrete and steel, Beaver Stadium’s primary function will remain what it’s always been: a place to gather, a place to celebrate, a place to which generations of Penn Staters can always come home.