With 80,000 people packing its seats each football Saturday, Notre Dame Stadium is no stranger to big events. Saturday, however, the stadium will host a different kind of event, as country music artist Zach Bryan and comedian Shane Gillis perform at the stadium’s first concert since Billy Joel in 2022. In addition to the bowl, 7,500 floor seats will be filled. Experience Notre Dame and its campus partners are preparing for a busy event.
“It’s basically a sold-out show. We had incredible attention at the point of sale, basically selling out at that point,” Lee Sicinski, executive director of University events said at a Thursday press conference regarding the event. “So tickets can be found online, but for all intents and purposes, it’s a sold out show.”
The concert is the latest example of the University using the stadium for events beyond football. Sicinski said these events, such as the NHL’s Winter Classic and the soccer match between Celtic FC and Chelsea last year, help to broaden the University’s reach by bringing in new visitors.
“I’m really excited for so many people who probably don’t know what Touchdown Jesus is to experience Notre Dame,” Sicinski said.
In anticipation of the concert, various stakeholders both on and off campus have prepared for a busy weekend.
Sicinski and the University worked closely with promoter AEG Presents to plan the event. Set-up crews have been working in the stadium for the last week to ready for the concert.
“All throughout this week, they’re loading in floor covering,” Sicinski said. “First they load the roof, they raise the roof and they load the stage underneath it.”
The work would be a lot easier, Sicinski said, with protection from the Midwest elements.
“I wish we had a roof over the stadium. It would definitely help with weather,” he said.
Responsibility for the production of a concert such as this one doesn’t just fall on one person, though. There are many crew members and workers who have contributed to the making of the event.
“There’s about 50 to 55 trucks that go along with the production,” Sicinski said. “It’s a big operation with a lot of both local crews and crews from throughout the United States, quite frankly, but they’re getting ready, and they’re doing everything here at Notre Dame.”
Seven days after the concert, the stadium needs to be ready to host Notre Dame’s first home game of the season against Texas A&M. The quick turnaround presents its own challenges, but Sicinski said the events team will be equipped to handle them. He cited the partnership they’ve established with the athletics and football operations team, who have helped them set up for the concert and will also help prep the venue for the game next week.
Tourist rush
Much like the University’s events team, businesses, especially those directly south of campus, are accustomed to busy weekends. O’Rourke’s and Brother’s Bar and Grill, two cornerstones of the Eddy Street social scene, welcome the increase in traffic.
“When we have a concert, we kind of treat it like a home game,” Amber Goddard, the general manager of O’Rourke’s, said. “Obviously, it’s not like a whole four-day event, like when people come into town for the home game, but we still treat the day itself like we’re going to be just as busy.”
The increase in patrons necessitates a large increase in inventory, large enough that the business, located on the corner of Eddy Street and Angela Boulevard, can’t hold it all.
“So we even park a big semi out back that has a freezer, cooler and has a whole bunch of extra food in it, because we think we’re just going to be that busy, and we stock up on all of our beer and liquor and our staff,” Goddard said.
Goddard added that O’Rourkes will be having a country-themed karaoke night after the concert.
Victoria Gamez, a bartender at Brother’s, echoed Goddard’s anticipation.
“We’re expecting [the concert] to be just like a home game weekend, with that kind of crowd. We’re making sure we’re stocked on everything, and we’re just really excited about the atmosphere and the Zach Bryan fans. We’re trying to cater to them and also manage the crowds,” Gamez said.
Transportation and safety
The Notre Dame Police Department (NDPD) has well-established procedures for gamedays, when the south side of campus is flooded with tailgaters, visitors and fans. Deputy chief of police services Bill Thompson said at the press conference that while NDPD anticipates the event will go smoothly, it will be slightly different from a football weekend.
“Our neighbors get kind of used to the cadence of football traffic, so they know when the best times are to come and go,” Thompson said. “One of the challenges with a concert, it’s a different kind of crowd, different kind of arriving crowd, and we also know that a lot of folks who are coming to this concert probably have never been to Notre Dame or Notre Dame Stadium before.”
At the press conference, spokespeople from NDPD, South Bend Police and St. Joseph County Police, including Thompson, emphasized patience when navigating the areas around campus. All three departments will have a presence at the event, with SBPD supplying 50-60 officers and a tactical team from the county on the scene.
“If your GPS is saying, ‘hey, go this way,’ just know that that might not be an option, and there is a reason for that,” Brad Rohrscheib, lieutenant at SBPD, said. “We close roads and direct traffic for everyone’s safety, and we will have officers at all the major intersections assisting pedestrians with crossing as well.”
Roads into and out of campus, especially those with access to parking lots, will be converted to one-ways, inbound before the concert and outbound after, much like on gamedays. All of the usual parking lots will be open for tailgating starting at noon.
“We want to make sure that things are safe, so there’s no open flames or those kinds of things,” Thompson said. “But the general kind of tailgating, picnic, sorts of things that folks do at events like this, we welcome that.”
Students received an email on Thursday instructing them to move their cars to Lake, Bulla, Rugby or Wilson lots before Saturday morning.
Student ticket experience
When tickets were released for a Notre Dame community presale in March, seniors graduating in May had the opportunity to purchase tickets as students, despite the concert occurring after graduation. Some recent graduates, such as Caroline Darrow ‘25, were able to make it work, planning a trip back to Notre Dame just four months after finishing school.
“Luckily, the stars kind of aligned for me to be able to come back for the concert,” Darrow wrote in a statement to The Observer. “I am attending grad school this coming school year, and my orientation actually starts the Monday following the concert in Chicago.”
For those who are living in Chicago or elsewhere in the Midwest, the trip back is relatively easy. But many graduated seniors who live farther away were not able to return for the concert.
“With the fluidity of employment plans and unknown start dates when tickets came out, a good amount of people had to sell their tickets or not buy them from the beginning,” Darrow wrote. “It’s definitely sad to know some of my good friends aren’t able to join us back in [South Bend] but I know they are off doing great things.”
Darrow said that it would be weird to be back on campus again so soon, but she is looking forward to seeing old friends.
“I think it’s a perfect mini reunion to touch base before work or other post-grad plans get busier or more chaotic,” she wrote. “I know it’s a thing that a lot of us have been looking forward to.”
Freshmen, on the other hand, had the opposite problem: They are now living on campus, but at the time of the presale, they did not have access to the community presale. They were forced to get creative, finding tickets on third-party apps like SeatGeek and StubHub, purchasing them from upperclassmen in dorm group chats or utilizing their connections to the University.
Maria Marlowe-Rogers, a freshman attending the concert, said that her brother who graduated last year was able to get her tickets.
“I had missed the Zach Bryan concert that was held near my hometown, so when my brother asked me if I wanted tickets because he was coming to Notre Dame, I immediately said yes. I’m excited to go to the concert because I’ve never been to a country music concert and because I get to go with my new friends,” Marlowe-Rogers said.
