It is the home of the Idaho Vandals of the Big Sky Conference for four sports (football, tennis, indoor track and field, soccer).

Following the 1974 season, a barrel-arched roof and vertical end walls were added and the stadium re-opened as an enclosed facility in September 1975.

From February 2001 until the opening of ICCU Arena in autumn 2021,[9][10] the Kibbie Dome was reconfigured for basketball games and was referred to as the Cowan Spectrum, seating 7,000.

The Pacific Coast Athletic Association (PCAA), known since 1988 as the Big West Conference, had been launched in 1969 and Idaho was attempting to join, but political wrangling in the state legislature and subsequent budget cuts caused a change in the scope of the stadium project.

The revised plan was for a smaller capacity football stadium, to be enclosed to allow use as a basketball arena (and indoor track and tennis as well).

Construction on the concrete grandstands started in February 1971,[14] after a fire destroyed the previously condemned wooden Neale Stadium in November 1969.

The Vandal football team played its limited home schedule for the next two seasons at WSU's Rogers Field in nearby Pullman.

[26][27] The arched roof and vertical end walls were completed in time for the 1975 season's home opener on September 27, a deflating 29–14 loss to Idaho State in front of 14,079.

[28] The enclosed stadium was renamed that year for William H. Kibbie, a construction executive from Salt Lake City and a primary benefactor of the project; he contributed $300,000 in 1974 to initiate the funding drive.

[14][26][29][30] Bill Kibbie (1918–1988),[31] originally of Bellevue in Blaine County, was a UI student for less than a month in 1936 when he withdrew due to his father's illness.

[32][33] He entered the construction business, then served as a B-24 pilot in World War II, and eventually founded JELCO in 1957,[34] later EMKO, a major contracting company in Utah.

When the university announced it would enclose its football stadium, the fledgling Trus Joist Company of Boise bid on and won the project.

[23][41][42][43] The first basketball game was played on January 21,[44] and the inaugural Vandal Invitational indoor track meet was held three days later.

The 4.5-acre (1.8 ha) outer surface of Hypalon and underlying polyurethane foam were improperly applied and a second attempt to seal the roof with Diathon in the late 1970s did not succeed.

[49][50][51][52][53][54] After an extended period of finger-pointing and threatened legal action,[55] an out-of-court settlement was reached; a new superstructure with a composite roof was built over the original.

The football field runs an unorthodox east–west, but even with the new translucent upper end walls (2009 and 2011), sun location is not a major visibility issue.

When Dennis Erickson returned as head coach in 2006, there was talk of adding a second deck to the Kibbie Dome to increase the football seating to 25,000, and building a new basketball arena.

The west wall was replaced with a non-combustible construction assembly; translucent plastic panels on the upper half and opaque metal siding on the lower.

The stadium has also served as the home of the Vandal basketball teams, providing increased seating capacity over the venerable Memorial Gym (built in 1928), a block to the east.

Since February 2001,[9][10] the basketball layout was separated from the rest of the stadium by massive black curtains to give the court a more intimate "stadium-within-a-stadium" feel, with a reduced seating capacity of 7,000.

During the early 1980s, with Don Monson as head coach, the Kibbie Dome was considered one of the 20 toughest home courts in college basketball by Sports Illustrated.

Additional temporary seating was gradually increased on the north basketball sideline (center of the football field) and attendance exceeded 11,000 for several games during the 1982–83 season.

[69] The venue hosted three Big Sky Conference men's basketball tournaments (by winning the regular season title), in 1981, 1982, and 1993.

[74] Until the addition, the football and basketball teams, both Vandals and visitors, dressed in the Memorial Gym and made the lengthy walk (or run) west to the Kibbie Dome, often in rain or snow.

[75] In April 2004, the facilities were again enhanced with the addition of the 8,000-square-foot (740 m2) Vandal Athletic Center, designed by Opsis Architecture, home to the Norm and Becky Iverson Speed and Strength Center; the renovation of the men's and women's basketball, football, and volleyball locker rooms, and the addition of a state-of-the-art hydrotherapy pool (ARC).