Eck Stadium is a baseball stadium in Wichita, Kansas, United States. It is located on the south side of 21st Street between Hillside and Oliver on the campus of Wichita State University in northeast Wichita.The stadium is home of the Wichita State Shockers baseball team. It has played host to the Shockers in rudimentary form since 1978, and as a complete stadium since 1985. Officially called Eck Stadium, Home of Tyler Field it is sometimes informally referred to as Eck.The stadium, which has gone through numerous upgrades since its original completion, currently seats 7,851. This number does not include the Coleman Outfield Hill, made during the original construction because of lack of funding to haul the dirt away, which can seat hundreds more.On Sept. 23, 1999, The Coleman Co. put a $500,000 exclamation point on Wichita State University's Project FutureShox, a $7.8 million effort to make Eck Stadium-Home of Tyler Field the premier collegiate baseball facility in the nation. Plans to significantly upgrade Eck Stadium were first announced on Jan. 28, 1998, and were taken to another level with the leadership of Gene Stephenson, the winningest collegiate baseball coach since 1978.Several major contributors stepped forward on the front end of the project, and on Sept. 23, The Coleman Co. accentuated a project that had Wichita State on its way to having the best collegiate baseball facility in the country.HistoryWhen Gene Stephenson revived the Shocker baseball program in 1978, the team played most of the season at the city-owned McAdams Field. With six games left in the season, the team moved to its first on-campus facility, Shocker Field. It was a bare-bones facility built on a former golf practice course, with little more than an AstroTurf field, a chain-link fence and a scoreboard. Limited seating was installed in 1979. The first semi-permanent seating was a 322-seat bleacher section installed in 1981.
