Tours

Guests may take as much time as they like to independently explore the various museum exhibits.

The museum has three galleries for visitors to experience:

• The Upper Gallery, focused on Indoor Varsity Sports (gymnastics, fencing, rifle, boxing, wrestling, basketball, volleyball, bowling, swimming and diving, and ice hockey).
• The Lower Gallery, focused on Outdoor Varsity Sports (track and field, cross country, tennis, golf,baseball, softball, field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, and football, with special mention of cheerleading and the Blue Band).
• The Special Exhibit Gallery, which is currently displaying “I Am A Penn Stater: Nittany Lions in WWII." This exhibit tells stories from over 1200 Penn State student-athletes who served in WWII, using their own words as expressed through letters and diary entries. The exhibit features original photographs and artifacts drawn from our collection and  contributed by their families. It will be on display until June 2025.

The museum galleries are all easily accessible to guests through the self-guided tour. Additionally, we always offer complementary stadium views to our museum guests – staff members can take guests up to our Club level to get an elevated view inside Beaver Stadium.

Standard suggested donation amount applies; no reservations needed.

Docents can provide general overviews of Penn State’s entire varsity-level sports program history, or if guests have particular interests, upon request they can provide more in-depth knowledge through focused discussions. A general guided tour of the Upper and Lower Galleries usually takes about 45-60 minutes.

Docents can also provide overview and focused tours specifically of the WWII exhibit.

The overview offers a general highlight tour of the major stories from pre-war, through the major campaigns across the various war theaters, and into the post-war recovery.

We also have three focused exhibit tour options available for this exhibit:

• • • a look at our Nittany Lions who were involved in the Army Air Corps.  
    • a focus on those who were captured and had experiences as POW’s.
    • a discussion of the women in service who came through Penn State as participants in the Women’s Recreation Association (the forerunner to varsity athletics for women).
    • In development: a look at those men and women who were involved in the medical services during the war.

The WWII exhibit generally takes around 40-60 minutes to tour as a guided experience.

All guided gallery tours can also include a complementary stadium view upon request.

Standard suggested donation amount applies.

Tour must be arranged at least 2 weeks in advance of the visit

Also led by our docent corps, the stadium tour can be done in conjunction with the guided or self-guided museum tour, or as a stand-alone experience.

The stadium tour includes:

• Media room where Coach Franklin hosts press conferences
• Home team locker room
• Team tunnel and edge of the field (but NOT ON THE GRASS itself!)
• Letterman’s Club
• Recruiting Lounge
• Mount Nittany Club view

This tour by itself takes about 60-90 minutes; in conjunction with the guided museum tour, it would be around 2.5 hours.

There is a cost associated with the full stadium tour: $200 for the first 10 group members, and $15/person for each additional. There is no additional charge for groups to add on the guided or self-guided museum tour with their stadium tour experience. We have done stadium tours for groups as large as 80 people at once.

Reservations are REQUIRED – in addition to scheduling docents, we must also get approval from stadium facilities coordination to have guests in the stadium. Private stadium tours face additional scheduling limitations due to football team activities, stadium preparation around games, and other major University events; there are no stadium tours scheduled from Friday – Sunday of home football weekends or Spring Commencement weekend, or during the month of April leading up to Blue-White Weekend and the entire month of August.

We offer ticketed public stadium tours during PSU Parents and Families Weekend and Arts Festival Weekend – therefore there are no private stadium tours offered at those times.