Less than two weeks before the start of the University of Miami Hurricanes' 2022 college football season, the son of one of the school's biggest boosters is showing off the latest renderings for a proposed stadium at Tropical Park.
Johnny Ruiz, the son of billionaire UM booster and graduate John Ruiz, posted the renderings of the stadium from HKS Architects.
After an initial plan to build a new football stadium in the city of Coral Gables was met with backlash, Ruiz set his sights on the location nine miles from the school's campus as opposed to the 30 miles to UM's current home field, Hard Rock Stadium.
Get South Florida local news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC South Florida newsletters.
"It's gonna be at 4 Tropical Park — there's about 270 acres there," Ruiz told the Miami New Times in May. "The design is over the top, it's gorgeous, I've seen it already a couple of times."
Ruiz said he has spoken to the architectural firm that build SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California - site of February's Super Bowl LVI - about building a 65,000-seat stadium on the west side of the park located off Southwest 40th Street.
Ruiz told NBC 6 in February the site would include facilities for high school teams and the public too.
Sports
"It’s a complete, entire sort of landscape for the community," Ruiz said. "So Dade County schools, a lot of them don’t have baseball fields, a lot of them don’t have football fields. They don’t have the right facilities for basketball, for volleyball, for tennis. So this will incorporate all of it and provide a forum for all these sports to be played."
Ruiz said the park would have a police and fire station and place for a helicopter to land in emergencies.
The 1987 UM graduate publicly began the stadium push days after the Hurricanes hired Mario Cristobal - who Ruiz is related to through marriage - on December 7, 2021.
Ruiz initially proposed building a stadium on the site of Coral Gables High School, which was met with opposition from the city and Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
UM has played its home games at Hard Rock Stadium since the 2008 season, a move that came after spending over seven decades at the historic Orange Bowl.
