For 20 years, NIU’s Convocation Center has welcomed students and athletes in DeKalb

DeKALB – For 20 years, one building has acted as a campus hub helping to shape the athletic, living and learning experiences at Northern Illinois University: the Convocation Center.

The 215,000-square-foot arena is host to numerous functions every year, including theatrical productions, family shows, Division I sports, vaccination clinics and more.

John Cheney, the university’s deputy athletic director for operations, said that coupled with concerts, career fairs, dog shows and IHSA and IESA basketball games and wrestling meets, these events all strive to help foster a sense of community and belonging both on campus and in the local community.

The Convocation Center originally opened its doors on NIU’s west campus in 2002. Around that time, the university identified a need for an arena with office and training space for athletics, said Cary Groth, the university’s former athletic director.

“We didn’t have a large facility on campus other than the field house,” Groth said, referencing the Chick Evans Field House at Annie Glidden Road and Lucinda Avenue. “The field house was built in the ’50s. We always had buckets and garbage cans for leaking roofs. … It was an old facility. There really wasn’t any way you could expand that building, build onto that building, because it was built in a way that you couldn’t do that. So we started looking into the feasibility of a new arena.”

Groth said project leaders visited arenas around the country for inspiration, including Penn State University and Illinois State University.

Ultimately, university officials took some of the components they liked from other buildings and made it their own.

“We had the land. A lot of those places didn’t have land,” Groth said. “But NIU in DeKalb had land to build, so why not use that space without having to get into those extra costs?”

University officials agreed to pay $36 million to construct the arena, primarily using student fees to cover a major portion of the annual bond payment. Cheney said the building is not yet fully paid off. Students pay $8.22 per credit hour in fees that go toward the annual debt payment, Cheney said.

“It got pushed out a little bit, but it should be at least 10 years left on bond payment,” Cheney said.

Groth said seeing the arena become a reality was a dream come true.

“I went by it every day,” she said. “When you can see a dream that’s shared by many, not just by athletics, but when you’re part of that planning, down to details, where you’re picking out the furniture, you’re picking out the color of the seats, you’re watching it being built, it’s really rewarding. It was beautiful. It still is. It served a purpose.”

Fast forward to 2022, and the Convocation Center has prompted the university to see some success in athletics.

“We’ve won several conference championships here,” Cheney said.

Cheney credits the arena for elevating the level of play he’s seen among the Division I athletic programs.

“That was one of the things originally that when the facility was built was probably one of the best basketball arenas in the Mid-American Conference, as well as the auxiliary gym,” Cheney said. “[It] is a great opportunity for our volleyball team. It’s a smaller gym with 700 people or so when it’s packed, but it’s a great environment for our student-athletes.”

The arena, however, hasn’t always been met with such fanfare.

Groth acknowledged that with constructing the arena came an opportunity to serve both sporting and non-sporting events and said she hoped to set the record straight about the building’s purpose at the time when project leaders sought approval.

“The student newspaper was positive sometimes and negative other times, but we got a good read on how the students and others were feeling,” Groth said. “We tried to address everything we could at that time.”

Outside of athletics, some prominent figures known to have traversed the arena over the years are Trevor Noah, John Mayer, Ciara, Brad Paisley, Cedric the Entertainer, Thomas Rhett, Miranda Lambert and Darius Rucker.

Cheney said the university takes pride in bringing an array of acts to campus.