Penn State trustees approve $50M naming rights deal for field at Beaver Stadium. What to know
Penn State’s board of trustees has approved a new name for the field at Beaver Stadium by a 22-8 vote. The field will be known as West Shore Home Field at Beaver Stadium for the next 15 years, with West Shore Home donating $50 million over that time period.
The Penn State board of trustees and the finance and investment committee met Monday morning to discuss the “proposed recommendation from the facilities and academic unit naming committee,” according to the agenda. The board voted to pass the resolution after an extended discussion that was at times contentious.
The deal will be front-loaded with more of the money coming earlier in the 15 years to limit the borrowing necessary for the Beaver Stadium renovation project.
The project, which is slated to cost up to $700 million, will receive all $50 million from the deal.
With the approval, the Penn State athletic department has now raised nearly $131 million toward a stated goal of $134 million in funding from gifts to go toward the project.
The gift from West Shore Home and CEO B.J. Werzyn, a 1999 graduate from Penn State, is the second-largest in Penn State athletic department history. It falls short of the $100+ million gift from Terry Pegula that helped fund the university’s hockey programs, including its hockey facility, Pegula Ice Arena.
“Penn State is a special place that is developing our future leaders,” Werzyn said in a statement. “West Shore Home, my family and I are proud to help advance this critical mission.”
While the vote passed, it did not come without pushback.
Trustees Anthony Lubrano and Barry Fenchak, among others, led the push to have the field named after former Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno. Board members Ted Brown, Daniel Delligatti, Brandon Short, Matt McGloin, Jay Paterno and Suzan Collins joined them as “no” votes on the matter.
McGloin, a former quarterback at Penn State under Paterno, claimed the university had decided to name the field after the head coach in the summer of 2011.
“Here we sit 14 years later and the field at Beaver Stadium has not yet been named Paterno Field at Beaver Stadium,” McGloin said. “Is this because we’re fearful that we may receive some criticism for it? Personally, in my career, if I was concerned with criticism, I would have never stepped foot on Penn State’s campus in 2008.”
This is not the first time members of the board have pushed to honor Penn State’s former coach.
About a year ago Lubrano introduced — then withdrew — a resolution to name the field at Beaver Stadium after Paterno. He withdrew it after Jay Paterno, Joe Paterno’s son, asked the resolution be held for a future date. At the time, Lubrano said he reserved the right to reintroduce it.
While introducing it, Lubrano said he has urged the administration and trustees to “meaningfully recognize the innumerable contributions of Joe and Sue Paterno to our great school” since he returned to the board in 2020. He said everyone should be proud of the contributions of Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach from 1966 until 2011, when he was fired in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. He died 10 weeks later.
Sue Paterno has remained an active member of the community, volunteering for events involving Thon, the Special Olympics and many others, and has continued to donate to charitable causes.
During the February 2024 trustees meeting, Jay Paterno said university President Neeli Bendipudi’s administration had indicated to the board that they didn’t want the resolution to happen at that time and instead wanted to focus on current challenges facing the university. If they wanted to honor Joe Paterno’s legacy now, they should respect the wishes of the administration, he said at the time.
Lubrano put forward an amendment Monday to name the field after Paterno, but board of trustees chairman David Kleppinger threw it out because it did not first go through the facilities and academic unit naming committee.
While a source told the CDT there were discussions about other proposals, West Shore Home’s was the only one that matured to the level of reaching the board of trustees.
The name change for the field follows a trend in college football in recent years. Several universities have altered the names of their field in exchange for gifts or as part of corporate naming rights deals. One of the examples of the former is at Wisconsin, where the field is named for former head coach and athletic director Barry Alvarez. That earned the school’s athletic department north of $13 million in exchange for the name change in perpetuity.
While the agreement at Penn State is for 15 years, it can be revoked if the payment schedule is not met or if the university’s policy on naming facilities and academic units is violated.
That includes the name potentially being revoked if “any of the officers or directors of such corporation are later convicted of a felony or incur civil sanctions in their capacity as officers or directors of such corporation, which crimes or sanctions, in the sole discretion of the board of trustees, are significantly detrimental to the reputation of the corporation, such that continued name association between such corporation and a university facility would be contrary to the best interests of the university.”
This story was originally published March 10, 2025 at 11:12 AM.
