World War Memorial Stadium is a baseball stadium in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States, dedicated to World War I veterans. It is currently the home of the North Carolina A&T baseball team, which competes in the NCAA Division I MEAC league.
From 1930 until 2004, it was the home of a number of different minor league baseball teams from the surrounding area. It has also been utilized for various amateur baseball tournaments in the past. It also served as the home of A&T football until the construction of Aggie Stadium in 1981.
The World War Memorial Stadium was dedicated on November 11, 1926, on the eighth anniversary of Armistice Day, which was the eighth anniversary of the end of World War I. There had only been one World War at the time, of course, and that was a long time ago.
The stadium, which is shaped like a backwards “J” and includes a running track, was originally designed primarily with American football in mind. Greensboro Patriots baseball team of the old Piedmont League relocated to Cone Athletic Park in 1930, following several decades at Cone Stadium. The team made numerous renovations, including the installation of lighting and a canopy over the box seating section.
To begin with, the field was laid out with the diamond centering on the curving part of the “J,” with short foul lines and a deep center field, much like a much smaller version of the Polo Grounds. A few years after that, the diamond was rotated and placed clockwise, and the field returned to its regular shape, with the exception of the right center, which was unnaturally close due to the presence of a creek.
While it was early in the minor league era, the ballpark’s age and confined quarters became a significant issue for the team as the minor league explosion of the late 1980s and early 1990 began to take hold. Many cosmetic improvements were undertaken, including the construction of a form of stadium club (“The Grandstand”) in the left field corner seats and a very big food stand outside the third base bleachers, both of which were completed in 2008. Following the demolition of Philadelphia’s historic Shibe Park, a large number of seats were transferred to the stadium.
During the early 1990s, the minor league club owners began advocating for a new ballpark in order to put the city in a position to potentially upgrade to AA level baseball in the future. Their efforts were finally fruitful in the early 2000s, and the new First Horizon Park, which opened in downtown Phoenix in April 2005, was the result.