Nearly 3,000 miles separate Lehighton from Pasadena, California, but Dedan Brozino sees something familiar in the two places.

It’s the connection people have to them.

The Lehighton native recently helped bring a $31 million project at historic Rose Bowl Stadium across the finish line with the opening of the new Rose Bowl Field Club.

Brozino, president of the Rose Bowl Legacy Foundation and chief development officer of Rose Bowl Stadium, helped lead the privately funded project, one of the most significant improvements to the century-old venue.

Yet when Brozino talks about preserving the Rose Bowl’s past while preparing it for the future, his thoughts don’t stay in Pasadena for long.

“The emotion and the connectivity that people have to the Rose Bowl reminds me a lot of the emotion and connectivity that people have in a small town like Lehighton,” he said.

Built into the south end of the stadium, the Field Club gives the Rose Bowl something it never previously had — a field-level premium club — while incorporating pieces of a structure that opened in 1922.

Historic pillars dating to 1928 remain exposed. The location of the stadium’s original flagpole is marked. Pasadena’s distinctive Batchelder tile lines the Rose Bowl-shaped bar, while an outdoor patio overlooks the field. UCLA’s football team now passes through the club on its way to the field.

For Brozino, those details matter as much as what is new.

“It feels like it belongs there,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like this bright, shiny object. We didn’t take this 104-year-old stadium and take it to the ground and rebuild it. We figured out how to preserve the 104-year-old stadium, but then add this modernized element that creates an experiential aspect to the Rose Bowl that has never been felt before.”

Brozino had seen the Field Club on paper and watched it take shape during construction. Seeing people experience the finished space for the first time was different.

Fans gathered several rows deep before kickoff to watch UCLA make its entrance through the club during the first game after its opening.

The scene even stirred a memory for Brozino from nearly 3,000 miles away — spectators gathering along the track at Lehighton’s old stadium on Friday nights.

“Seeing the joy on their face was awesome,” Brozino said.

There was another emotion, too.

“It’s pretty emotional,” he said of seeing the project completed.

“That club, as cool as it was to see people enjoy it on Saturday, that club is meant for the next generation and the people that we will never meet,” Brozino said. “And that’s how the Rose Bowl kind of lives on.”

A sense of place

Brozino knew what it was like for a stadium to become part of a community long before he arrived in Pasadena.

He grew up with one in Lehighton.

Long before the school opened its current multipurpose facility, Brozino played football at Lehighton’s old stadium, where spectators gathered around the track surrounding the field on Friday nights.

More than two decades later, he still remembers it.

Brozino has heard countless stories about the Rose Bowl that work much the same way. Ask people what the stadium means to them and the answers aren’t necessarily about championships or famous games. They remember where they sat, who they were with, a tailgate or some seemingly insignificant detail that became part of their experience.

Brozino has his own versions of those memories from Lehighton.

Many involve the teammates he played alongside on Lehighton’s 2001 District 11 championship team. Nearly 25 years later, members of that group remain connected through a text thread with a fitting name.

“We have a text string called the 2001 Indians,” Brozino said. “And it’s just, it’s always a check-in.”

There are birthday wishes, messages of encouragement and updates about families and careers.

Some remained in football. Former teammate Vinnie Andrews is now the head football coach at Bangor, while Mike Cebrosky is the head football coach at King’s College. Others followed entirely different paths.

What has changed, Brozino said, is the way those relationships matter.

“As you get older, you kind of lean on each other differently, almost like you lean on each other in the locker room to have a game plan,” he said.

The group also shares the memory of someone who isn’t on the text thread.

Shane Smith, the featured tailback on the 2001 championship team, died in 2008. Friends, teammates and family later established the Shane M. Smith Memorial Fund through the Carbon County Community Foundation, with its primary focus on supporting the Lehighton football program.

“The reason we got together two, three years ago was in memory of Shane Smith, who passed away,” Brozino said. “He was a star tailback for us, and maybe the most electric person on our team.”

For Brozino, Smith remains part of what holds that group together.

“It’s Shane’s memory that has brought us together probably a little bit more tightly than even we were from the locker room stages of our friendship,” he said.

A path west

Those relationships survived even as Brozino’s life took him farther from Lehighton.

His path changed dramatically on his final high school football snap.

Brozino broke his left collarbone during Lehighton’s state playoff game against Selinsgrove. The injury was especially significant because he also threw left-handed as a baseball pitcher.

He went on to DeSales University, where he played baseball and was a member of the school’s only College World Series team. But the velocity and command he once had never fully returned.

Brozino began spending time with the sports information department at DeSales. Journalism was his minor, and he initially envisioned a career in communications or sports information.

He eventually came to view the injury as a “blessing in disguise” because it pushed him toward the business side of sports earlier than he otherwise might have gone.

After graduating, Brozino moved west, earned his master’s degree from Long Beach State and joined the school’s athletic department. He rose to senior associate athletic director for external relations, where fundraising became an increasingly important part of his work.

Brozino once envisioned becoming a Division I athletic director. Instead, he found himself increasingly drawn to the external side of the profession — particularly fundraising and building relationships.

Then the Rose Bowl came calling.

Brozino joined the organization in 2015. His work with the nonprofit Legacy Foundation centers on generating private support for improvements to the historic stadium and surrounding areas.

That can mean something as visible as the new Field Club. It can also mean the less glamorous work required to keep a century-old venue operating.

The next chapter

“This project is no longer a rendering,” Brozino said of the Field Club. “It is real. You can touch it. You can live in it. You can walk through it.”

Getting there wasn’t a certainty.

Brozino remembers hearing doubts about whether the project could be done, whether it would work and whether a modern premium space could fit naturally into a stadium whose history is fundamental to its identity.

Now, standing inside the finished product, he believes they found that balance.

“It’s emotional because it’s done,” Brozino said. “It’s emotional because we did it when people said that we couldn’t do it.”

The Field Club is part of a larger effort to prepare the Rose Bowl for its next chapter, with additional improvements planned for the historic venue.

Brozino believes finishing the project has created momentum for whatever comes next.

But some of what the Field Club means to him is more personal.

His daughter started high school this year. Someday, Brozino said, his children will be able to walk into the Rose Bowl and know their father had a hand in something that became part of it.

So will people he will never meet.

His parents still live in the Lehighton area. His sister is in Bethlehem, and his brother is in Bangor. The “2001 Indians” remain a text message away.

And Brozino still keeps an eye on what’s happening back home.

As his conversation with the Times News wound down, he made sure to point that out.

“You got a reader 3,000 miles away, man.”