InfoCision Stadium is home to Akron Zips football in the Mid-American Conference, a 30,000-seat outdoor bowl in northeast Ohio where the schedule runs from late-summer heat straight through November without asking permission. When the University of Akron upgraded its scoreboard system, the brief was clear: a display that could command the stadium, serve every fan in the seats, and hold up through whatever the season brought.
We installed a two-display LED system totaling 2,347 square feet across the south end of InfoCision Stadium. The centerpiece is a main scoreboard measuring 22.97 feet tall by 85.3 feet wide, 182 individual panels of 10.41mm outdoor LED running on a Novastar control system, with a surface area approaching 1,960 square feet. Alongside it, a 131-foot-wide fascia ribbon board at 10mm pixel pitch adds another 387 square feet of LED at field level, wrapping the visual presence of the south end structure around the entire lower fan experience.
Sunwater Steel engineered and fabricated the mounting structure, custom-built to position the scoreboard at the elevation and rake the installation required. The content package for both displays was created by Josh Echo-hawk of SportsGraphicsNow.com. The result is a display system that replaced aging infrastructure with a package built for the long haul and specific to the stadium, specific to the climate, and specific to what MAC football actually looks like on game day.
The main scoreboard at InfoCision Stadium is 182 panels: 26 wide, 7 tall, each one a meter square. When they're stacked and aligned into a single continuous surface, you have 85 feet of display face — and every panel in that array has to land in the right position within millimeters, at height, in sequence, on a structural frame that doesn't forgive error at scale.
But the installation logistics were the solvable part. The harder problem was placement. InfoCision Stadium is a bowl configuration, which means nearly every section of seating has a direct look at the south end structure — and where you mount a scoreboard in that geometry, at what height and what angle, determines the viewing experience for tens of thousands of people. Too low and the display disappears behind the field-level sightline for sections at the far end. Too high and the rake becomes wrong for fans in the lower rows directly below it. The window where a scoreboard actually serves the full house is narrower than it looks on a drawing.
UberDisplays and Sunwater Steel worked through the structural engineering and placement logic together, landing on a mounting position that maximized sightline coverage across the bowl — then fabricated a custom steel mount to hold the board at exactly that elevation and tilt. Once the structure was in place, panel installation sequenced from the center of the display outward, maintaining alignment across the full 85-foot face as each row was added.
The Result: The scoreboard is positioned to be visible and readable from the lower rows to the upper deck, aligned to the tolerances an 85-foot continuous display demands, and anchored to a structural mount built specifically for the conditions of this installation.
The Akron Zips' home schedule opens in late August and runs through November. That window includes late-summer afternoons when ambient temperatures are pushing 90° and direct sun can drive surface brightness on a south-facing display past 100,000 lux — conditions where an underpowered outdoor display washes out and loses its image in the glare. It ends in late November, when game-time temperatures in Akron regularly drop below 40° and the weather can shift from rain to sleet mid-game. The display has to handle both ends of that range without service intervention.
This is the part of an outdoor spec that looks easy on paper and reveals itself in operation. Most outdoor LED panels are rated for a range of conditions. The question is whether the spec matches the actual environment — including the hard days, not just the average ones.
We selected both the scoreboard and the fascia ribbon board for the full operating window at InfoCision Stadium. On the brightness side, the scoreboard needed to hold readability under direct peak-season sunlight — a requirement that's especially relevant for afternoon home games early in the schedule when the sun angle is high and harsh. The fascia ribbon board, sitting at field level without the shelter of an upper-deck overhang, faces even more direct light exposure and was spec'd accordingly. For the cold end of the range, both displays' thermal operating specs cover the late-season window without risk of panel damage or display instability in game conditions. And for moisture — rain, standing water, dew, and the splash exposure that's unavoidable at field level — the panels are IP-rated to handle what an Ohio football season actually delivers.
The Result: The display system ran through the full 2024 Akron Zips season — early-season heat, mid-season rain games, and late-season cold — without a weather-driven service interruption.
