For two football seasons, if you sat in the east grandstand at Daylis Stadium, you spent the night looking across the field at a strip of yellow caution tape and a row of empty, rusting bleachers. That was not atmosphere. It was a condemned structure that the district could not let anyone sit in, and it quietly cut Billings' biggest Friday night tradition down to half a building.
That closure, not the ribbon-cutting happening this weekend, is the reason the last two years of Billings football felt different. And it explains something the highlight reels from Thursday's opener won't tell you: why the crowd numbers are about to jump before a single new banner goes up.
The Number Behind the Empty Seats
Billings School District 2 athletic director Mark Sulser has been saying it plainly for weeks. Crosstown games at Daylis used to draw 5,000 to 6,000 people. Once the west grandstand was condemned two years ago and roped off as unsafe, that kind of crowd became physically impossible. There was nowhere to put them.
The new west grandstand that opened this week holds up to 3,500 people on its own. Add the existing east side back into the mix and Billings is within reach of the old crosstown numbers for the first time since the closure. That's the actual story behind this week's excitement: not a nicer building, but a stadium that can finally fit the town again.
This Weekend's Actual Schedule
The rollout has been staged across three nights, one for each school that calls Daylis home.
| Date | Matchup | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Thu, Aug 27 | Billings Skyview vs. Helena High | First varsity game in the new stadium, 7 p.m. Helena won 41-14 |
| Fri, Aug 28 | Billings Senior vs. Missoula Big Sky | Second game in the complex, 6 p.m. |
| Sat, Aug 29 | Grand opening parade and dedication | 9 a.m. parade from Senior High's west lot, north on Virginia Lane, east on Parkhill Drive, south on 3rd St W, into the stadium's east gate |
| Fri, Sept 4 | Billings West vs. Missoula Hellgate | West's first game on the new field, 7 p.m. |
Saturday's parade includes a color guard from West High's JROTC, an interschool band, and an interschool dance and cheer performance, followed by remarks from Mayor Mike Nelson and formal recognition of the donors whose names are now on the building.
A Family Finishing What It Started in 2006
The name on the marquee now reads Sam McDonald Stadium at Daylis, and it's tempting to read that as a straightforward corporate sponsorship, the way a lot of renamed venues work. It isn't. It's the final chapter of one family's giving that has been running quietly through this exact address for two decades.
Sam McDonald founded Wendy's of Montana and started the Wendy's Foundation in 2000, which gave out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to local causes. In 2006, Wendy's of Montana paid for Daylis's first synthetic turf installation, and the field has been called Wendy's Field ever since. McDonald also helped fund McDonald Hall, home to Montana State University Billings' College of Business from 2002 to 2023. He died in 2012.
When the district opened stadium naming rights up for competitive bid last year, McDonald's family, Greg, Eileen and Debby, put in a $2 million bid over four years. A local law firm, Heenan & Cook, countered with $1.5 million over ten years, and for a while the district's board sat on the decision. Before the bigger bid, the McDonalds had already offered $500,000 just for naming rights on the closed west grandstand. They rolled that into the larger offer once the full stadium became available.
The board went with the McDonald family. And notably, the district chose to keep Daylis in the name rather than drop it entirely. That name honors Fred Daylis, a Billings Senior coach and principal whose 1926 football team and back-to-back 1926 and '27 basketball teams won state titles before he was killed in a 1947 car accident returning from a game near Custer. He was 47. Sulser said the McDonald family was the one that suggested keeping the older name attached, not the district.
The Other Names on the Building
The McDonald gift was the largest, but it wasn't the only one. Naming rights across the complex went to:
- Intermountain Health, which put $500,000 toward the west ticket entrance near the Senior High parking lot
- Bravera Bank, which put $250,000 toward the concessions area
- Scheels, the naming partner for the expanded track
- Underriner Motors, the naming partner for the new field
Two naming opportunities remain open as of this month, the press box and the east entrance, and the district says anyone who gives $5,000 or more gets a permanent spot on the donor wall.
What Actually Changed, Beyond the Paint
The scope of what got built is easy to undersell in a single "renovation" headline. The stadium now has a 10-lane track built to host top-level competition, four separate locker rooms so each of the three district schools and visiting teams get their own space instead of sharing, expanded concessions, bigger restrooms, and a dedicated area on the south end for food trucks and vendors alongside a grill facility booster clubs can activate for fundraisers. The field itself carries painted logos for Skyview, Senior and West side by side, with the end zones reading BILLINGS on the north side and MONTANA on the south.
None of that came cheap or fast. The district's original proposal for a full overhaul ran as high as $60 million, a number most residents and the board itself decided was too much to ask taxpayers to carry. What got built instead cost nearly $15 million, split roughly 50/50 between the school district and community fundraising led by the Bannack Group's Chase Rose. Groundbreaking came in December 2025, after football season ended, and Dick Anderson Construction crews put in 10 to 12 hour days with roughly 50 people on site to hit the August deadline. Even the old bleachers didn't go to waste. The Billings Motorcycle Club hauled off the salvaged seating to reuse at its motocross track.
Rose has called Daylis one of the more important pieces of that broader push, given that all three high schools call it home rather than each building its own separate facility, a fact that also explains why the district wanted every school represented on the field and in the locker room plans rather than favoring one.
"I won't live to see the end of this stadium," Sulser said. "I think aside from some future work on the east side as maybe a phase two, this is a 50-year, turnkey deal."
That's the same time horizon Fred Daylis's name has already survived, and the same instinct that led Sam McDonald to keep funding this one address for twenty years before his family's name finally went on the building. The people who built this expect it to outlast them, which is a fairly rare thing to hear said about a high school stadium.
Why This Is Worth Showing Up For
Beyond football, the district expects the new track to host crosstown soccer, the divisional track meet later this year, next summer's Shrine Game, and hopefully the opening ceremonies for the Big Sky State Games. That's a lot of Friday and Saturday nights across a lot of different sports, all funneling back into one building on the Senior High campus that spent two years unable to seat its own town.
If you've skipped Daylis the last couple of seasons because the crowd never felt the same, that wasn't nostalgia talking. The building genuinely couldn't hold what it used to. This week it can again, and the parade route runs right past the same grandstand that used to have caution tape strung across it.
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