Brooks Stadium opened in 2003, named for Coby Garrett Brooks and Boni Belle Brooks, the children of Robert H. Brooks. Their father grew up in Loris, South Carolina, just up the road, and went on to become chairman of Hooters of America. He wanted the building that would host Coastal Carolina's first football team to carry his children's names rather than his own. The Chanticleers opened the stadium on September 6, 2003, with an inaugural game against Newberry College. More than 8,000 fans showed up, which sounds modest only if you didn't realize Coastal had never fielded a football team before.

Phase I held just 6,408 seats, but the foundations were poured for something much larger. When Coastal announced its move to the Sun Belt Conference in 2015, the NCAA's FBS attendance minimums forced the question: could a small coastal university actually fill 15,000 seats? The answer involved 38 million dollars, two phases of construction, and a determined fanbase. By August 2019, the expansion was complete: more than 20,000 seats wrapped around the teal field, an upper deck rising on the west side, premium seating tucked in for boosters and television cameras.

Beyond the north end zone sits the Marrio & Josh Norman Fieldhouse, an 8.5 million-dollar facility opened in 2010. Josh Norman, the former NFL cornerback who came up through Coastal Carolina, donated heavily to the athletic department in 2018, and the building was renamed for him and his brother. Inside are the football offices, a 13,000-square-foot strength and conditioning center used by every Coastal athlete, and the Sasser Athletic Hall of Fame. It's the kind of facility that signals a program serious about its future, and it sits in the end zone of a stadium painted the color of shallow tropical water.

The playing surface inside the stadium has its own name: James C. Benton Field, dedicated in October 2006 after a substantial gift from the Benton family. It's where Coastal's program reinvented itself in the 2010s, where the now-famous teal turf turned a regional FCS program into national television fodder, and where Saturday afternoons in Conway shifted from afterthought to event. The crowd colors blend with the field — teal jerseys against teal grass — making the players visible mostly by motion. It's a viewing experience nothing else in college football quite replicates.

Brooks Stadium reshaped Coastal Carolina's identity. Before 2003, the university was a quiet sea-grant institution with a respected biology program and a marine science fleet. After Brooks, it became a place that could fill 20,000 seats on a Saturday, draw ESPN's College GameDay to Conway, and produce NFL talent on a teal field that television announcers couldn't stop describing. The stadium is functional infrastructure for a football program, but it's also the visible marker of a university that decided, with some help from a Hooters chairman's gift and a coastal town's appetite for big-time sports, to bet on visibility.