Built For What Comes Next

Marcello Rapini has spent four decades finding reasons to come back to Dinos football. These days, one of them is a game that hasn’t even happened yet. Asked to picture a new stadium on the University of Calgary campus, Rapini sees full stands with families, former teammates and Dinos alumni finding one another, exchanging hugs and retelling old stories. On the field, the next generation is wearing the same red and gold.

“I think it’s going to be electric,” says Rapini, BA’91, who arrived at UCalgary as a rookie in 1985 and today serves as president of the Dinos Fifth Quarter. “I think it’s going to be incredible.”

That history gets at something important about the proposed on-campus stadium: the building would be new, but the community it is meant to bring together has been growing for decades. And, for the people who have spent years building that community, this is about much more than just a new place to play field sports.

More than $23 million in philanthropic commitments have already been secured for a proposed facility designed with capacity for more than 5,000 spectators, with a seasonal dome allowing year-round use, improved training facilities, and space for football, soccer, rugby, recreation and community sports. For the Dinos, it would also provide something the program has never had: a true home to call their own on campus.

Seeing What is Possible

For Rapini, Dr. Andrew Buckley, BSc’16, MD’21, PGME’24, and brothers Anthony Woodson, BComm’12, and Robert Woodson, that home is as much about who comes next as who came before. Long before there were architectural concepts or fundraising conversations, Buckley was one of those kids. 

He still remembers his first time playing at McMahon Stadium in 2004. “Your jaw is on the floor,” he says. “You feel like you’re in the big leagues.”

Coming out of Rundle College, a smaller 3A high school program, Buckley wasn’t convinced he was good enough to play university football. He arrived at UCalgary hoping simply to make the roster, became the starting quarterback in 2013, and eventually moved on to the Calgary Stampeders before returning to UCalgary for medical school, residency and a career as a physician.

Football gave him a community and, in some ways, carried on a family connection. His father, Dr. Richard Buckley, BSc’80, MD’83, had played for the Dinos years earlier, making the opportunity to play in his hometown and in front of family even more meaningful. For Andrew, being able to walk around and greet dozens of his teammates across campus made a large university feel a little smaller. His own path showed him how visible opportunities can change what any young athlete believes is possible.

“It’s just 15 years too late,” Andrew jokes when asked for his first reaction to the new stadium vision. “I would have loved to play in something like this.”

He imagines current players carrying an added sense of pride because the program will finally have a home of its own. But his mind also returns to that kid stepping onto McMahon Stadium for the first time. Give a young athlete the opportunity to attend a camp, practice or game in a first-class university facility, Andrew says, and suddenly an abstract dream becomes something they can see.

“This is a possibility if you just stick with it,” he says.

The Woodson brothers know something about what happens after young players begin believing that. They grew up in the Calgary football community, played for the Dinos and eventually followed the same path as their father, Anthony (Tony) Woodson, Sr., who played four CFL seasons, including two with the Stampeders. Anthony junior himself spent six seasons in the CFL, while Robert was drafted by the Toronto Argonauts in 2017 and won a Grey Cup with them that same year.

The elder Woodson’s influence extended beyond his own playing career. In 2008, Tony launched Aim High Sports, a youth-development program Anthony and Robert took over in 2016 and reintroduced as RAW Sports. Today, much of their professional lives revolve around developing the next generation of athletes. Ask the brothers about their own journeys, though, and both quickly turn to the people who invested in them.

Anthony remembers being a young player struggling with his confidence when his coach, pulled him aside after a rough stretch and told him a bad practice or game wasn’t going to change his belief in him.

“I’m going to keep believing in you and keep investing in you,” Anthony remembers being told.

Robert’s example came later, after he joined the Dinos and found Rapini among his coaches. Robert earned a chance to start early, but he is candid that he was nowhere close to the player he would eventually become. What he remembers about Coach Rapini was an ability to see that future version without lowering the standard required to reach it.

“He could really see the vision in his players,” while still demanding the daily work needed to get there, Robert says. 

For Rapini, those relationships eventually became a bigger reason to stay than football itself. He has attended former players’ weddings and their children’s baptisms. Around Christmas, his birthday or seemingly random days, his phone occasionally lights up with messages from players who have landed a new job or earned a promotion and want him to know they still remember conversations about goal setting, preparation or hard work.

“It brings you back,” Rapini says. “It’s really meaningful because you have a lot of really special connections.”

That cycle is now repeating through players he once coached. Anthony and Robert have watched young kids enter RAW, grow into teenagers and begin coaching younger athletes themselves. Cole MacInnis and Charles Beach, for example, developed through their program and are now first-year Dinos who train as university athletes, then turn around and work with children who are where they once were.

“What better investment can we make as a community than investing in our youth and investing in the next generation of leaders?” Anthony says.

The challenge is finding enough places for that next generation to play.

A Home for What Comes Next

For organizations such as RAW, Calgary’s shortage of field space is not theoretical. Winter dramatically limits options, while warmer months bring competition between football, soccer and other sports for available facilities. The vision for UCalgary Stadium is intended, in part, to create more space, with the planned dome extending field access through the winter and evenings and weekends.

For Rapini, that need has become personal. He has a 27-year-old son, a 25-year-old daughter, and a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter who is just beginning to experience sports herself. Watching her try soccer and other activities has made him wonder what opportunities will exist for her as Calgary continues to grow.

“I am as focused on having a home for her to play in as I am for anybody else,” he says. “I just think our community needs it so badly.”

He can imagine Dinos football alongside youth programs, high school games, camps and leadership programs and his own daughter using the same facility for an entirely different sport.

“That infrastructure is going to outlast all of us.”

For Dinos football, a home of its own would also resolve a contradiction Rapini experienced for years. He points to the years between 2009 and 2019, when the program regularly competed for conference and national championships. The teams were excellent, yet players could emerge from the locker room at McMahon Stadium after preparing all week and find roughly 3,000 spectators surrounded by tens of thousands of empty seats.

Rapini remembers feeling for the athletes. In a stadium designed for a much larger crowd, much of the energy disappeared into empty space. He believes something was lost for the wider university too: with McMahon a 10 to 15-minute walk away, students living and studying on campus were physically separated from the varsity athletes representing their university.

A true on-campus stadium changes that equation, creating a place where students can gather for varsity games, intramurals and other events as part of everyday campus life.

“Sport has the ability to unite,” Rapini says.

Why They Keep Coming Back

For many former Dinos, that call has lasted long after their playing careers ended. When Rapini arrived in 1985, players attended the Fifth Quarter’s annual fundraising dinner and sold tickets to parents and friends. What once drew perhaps 150 or 200 people eventually grew into an event welcoming hundreds of alumni and community supporters each year.

As conversations about a new home persisted, members of the Fifth Quarter decided they needed to demonstrate how much support existed.

“We were going to roll up our sleeves, we were going to unite, we were going to work as a team, and then we were going to go out there and do everything we could to be successful,” Rapini says.

They knocked on doors, made calls and reached out through decades of relationships built in football, business and the wider Calgary community. Those efforts helped build the philanthropic commitments now backing this project. UCalgary is now in the concept and schematic design phase with GEC Architecture, though substantial additional investment is still required, the final amount has yet to be determined.

Andrew Buckley has watched those efforts from another generation and immediately points back to Rapini.

“He is such a strong leader behind the scenes,” he says, describing someone who has put his “whole heart and soul behind this program.”

Rapini is more comfortable describing what everybody else has built.

“Once a Dino, always a Dino,” he says, a phrase that could sound like just a slogan on the walls if his calendar didn’t provide so much evidence to support it. Former Dinos athletes often return as coaches; athletes become mentors; Alumni gather every spring; and, for individuals like Rapini, “kids” they once coached have kids of their own.

Anthony Woodson sees the stadium as another place where those circles can overlap. He imagines children participating in community football or camps and returning year after year. Some may eventually become Dinos. Some may become coaches. Most will never play professionally, which is precisely why he believes the venue’s value shouldn’t be measured only by how many athletes reach the highest levels. 

“The impact’s gonna be hard to define in one sentence,” he says. “It’s gonna be a story that keeps writing itself as more and more athletes go through it and as time goes on.”

That story is what Rapini sees when he imagines that first Dinos game. Not simply new seats or a new field, but people: alumni finding one another again, students making the game part of their university experience, and young players watching the Dinos and imagining themselves on the field someday.

Asked what someone misses if they look at the concepts and see only a new stadium, Rapini points beyond the architecture. He has watched athletes arrive primarily wanting to play football and leave with degrees, careers and relationships that followed them long after their last game. 

“What they’re missing is what the stadium could do for them, for their kids and for the community,” he says, “not just today, but for generations to come.”

The stadium has yet to be built. But the foundation for the community that will fill it was laid decades ago.