You walk into Lucas Oil Stadium in June 2024 thinking you know her. You’ve known her for years. She’s been the backdrop for some of your family’s favorite moments—watching the Colts play, cheering at marching band competitions, and, in one very surreal case, photographing a wedding right on the 50-yard line back in 2015. You’ve stood in the tunnels. You’ve felt the rumble under your feet when the crowd went wild. You’ve smelled the faint cocktail of turf, popcorn, and maybe a little stale beer.
You know her, so you’re not expecting her to smell like chlorine.
This isn’t football season. This is the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials. And the place where Peyton Manning once threw a touchdown now holds a shimmering, Olympic-standard swimming pool—lanes stretching toward the end zone like this was the most normal thing in the world.
At first, your brain struggles to process the shift. Stadium seating, massive scoreboard, banners, yes—but also water glistening under spotlights, starting blocks lined up like sprinters about to launch, and swimmers in sleek caps cutting through the water while the crowd cheers. You keep looking around like maybe you took a wrong turn and ended up in some kind of aquatic parallel universe.
Lucas Oil is a shape-shifter. She’s seen confetti rain down at the 2012 Super Bowl and hardwood rolled across the turf for the NCAA Final Four. She’s been a Royal Rumble ring where body slams replaced touchdowns, and a soccer pitch for the International Champions Cup, where football met fútbol, and Lucas Oil proved it could speak both languages fluently.
She’s sparkled with Taylor Swift’s sequins, rattled with monster trucks shaking nacho trays, and thundered with the precision of Bands of America and Drum Corps International bands and color guards. She’s hosted thousands of GenCon gamers plotting galactic empires in Twilight Imperium, and even hosted several weddings where couples pledged their love standing on the centerfield Colts logo like they belonged there all along.
And now? She’s held an Olympic-sized pool, shimmering under spotlights where end zones once stood.
Somewhere between watching a relay race and buying overpriced bottled water, it hits you: this isn’t really about swimming—or football, or concerts, or monster trucks, or weddings. This is about capacity.
Lucas Oil Stadium was built for one thing: professional football. But her strength isn’t just in what she was designed for—it’s in how she’s been used. And maybe that’s true for us too.
We tell ourselves the thing we were trained for, the title we were given, or the identity we’ve always carried is the thing we have to keep doing forever. We put our lives in one category—“this is my career,” “this is my role,” “this is my lane”—and we forget that reinvention is possible. That expansion is allowed. That we can host more than one kind of season.
It’s easy to believe you’re only good for the thing you’ve always done. Maybe you’ve been in the same job for ten years and the idea of trying something different feels reckless. Maybe you’ve been the “responsible one” in the family so long that the thought of pursuing a wild, creative dream feels selfish. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that your “field” in life can only hold one kind of event.
But what if that’s not true?
What if you can have your Taylor Swift era and your monster truck season? What if you can be the place where board games and marching bands and gold medal dreams all happen in the same lifetime?
Sure, Lucas Oil was designed for football, but she’s never stayed in one lane. She adapts, transforms, reinvents—and no one doubts her capacity to hold it all. That’s what gets me: no one stands in the stands saying, “Wait, is she allowed to do this?” They just cheer, buy the ticket, and take it all in. Maybe that’s the invitation for us too—not to question whether we are “allowed” to change, but to step fully into it.
Sometimes the only thing keeping us from trying something new is the story we tell ourselves. We think:
- “I didn’t go to school for that.”
- “I’m too old to start over.”
- “That’s just not my thing.”
- “People would think I’ve lost it.”
And yet—somewhere in Indianapolis—there’s a crew who once stood in an empty stadium and said, “You know what? Let’s put an Olympic-sized swimming pool in here.”
If they can make that happen, maybe you can, too. Maybe you can make a career shift. Or start that side hustle. Or move to a new city. Or learn a skill that has nothing to do with your current title.
You don’t have to erase what came before. Football is still football at Lucas Oil. It’s just not only football anymore. The beauty of that stadium isn’t just in what it holds—it’s in the way it adapts to hold whatever comes next. It’s a reminder that your value isn’t tied to one purpose, one role, or one “field.”
If Lucas Oil can transform from touchdowns to concerts, from body slams to swimming lanes, from monster trucks to wedding vows, then you can be more than one thing in your lifetime without losing who you are.
Because the truth is—capacity isn’t about what you were built for. It’s about what you make room for. If a stadium can hold sequins one night and chlorine the next, then maybe you can stop limiting yourself to just one version of who you are.
You were never meant for just one field, one role, one season. So build the pool. Host the concert. Roll the dice. Take up the space that’s waiting. The limits aren’t nearly as fixed as you once thought—and the possibilities? They’re endless.
Rachel L. Richard is a small-town farm girl turned suburbanite, a delightfully irreverent optimist, Mrs & Mama, floppy dog ear scratcher, lifelong learner, channel surfer, wanderer, believer, occasional creative, out-of-practice musician, cupcake addict, book devourer, and lover of all people.
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