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Cajun Field (built 1971) is a stadium located in the city of Lafayette, Louisiana. Nicknamed The Swamp, it is the home field of Louisiana’s Ragin’ Cajuns. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette stadium is primarily used for its American football and women’s soccer athletic teams.

Cajun Field boasts 2,577 chairback seats and bleacher seating to the capacity of another 28,423, giving the stadium an official seating capacity of 31,000.

In 1988, when the school was known as the University of Southwestern Louisiana, the field gained The Swamp as a nickname, which was noted on stadium signage, the school yearbook and a year later in the 1989 official Southwestern Louisiana sports media guide. The characteristics which helped create the tradition of the swamp-referenced nickname are tied to the field’s early 1970s construction and even refer back to the original football field for what was then the Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute in the early 1900s.

The university’s first football field was on the main campus adjacent to a small cypress pond, which later became Cypress Lake, also nicknamed The Swamp.

Today, Cajun Field’s surface is set two feet below sea level in a natural bowl. With the below-sea level playing surface, a total of four 60-horsepower pumps and a sophisticated drainage system help keep the field in solid playing condition even during the frequent south Louisiana rainstorms. The subsurface stadium requires many fans to walk down to their seats. Ragin’ Cajuns football players and their opponents enter Cajun Field through an underground tunnel from the Louisiana-Lafayette athletics complex.

The Swamp nickname also fits with the area’s geography, comprising many bayous and wetlands, including the Atchafalaya Basin and the nearby Gulf of Mexico marshlands. The National Wetlands Research Center, a renowned United States Geological Survey research facility at Louisiana-Lafayette, is located less than a half-mile away from Cajun Field.

[Source: Wikipedia]