Abstract: Sports stadiums play a crucial role in post-earthquake evacuation and disaster relief, necessitating high seismic resilience. Integrating resilience design into the structural design of sports stadiums is an urgent issue that must be addressed. A forward design process was proposed for resilience, which takes the changes in structural indicators and resilience as the guiding direction for resilience design, thus breaking through the current design pattern of resilience design as a “supplementary verification” after structural design. Through the structural parametric design of a large-span steel structure gymnasium, the inter story displacement angle index and base shear-force of 113 structural models were extracted and used as structural stiffness and strength indicators respectively. The variation patterns of the structural and resilience indicators were then investigated based on spatial distribution. The findings are as follows: The magnitude of the stiffness and strength indicators is associated with the structural seismic system. A rigid seismic system leads to higher stiffness or strength indicators, which results in the highest resilience indicator, while a flexible seismic system reduces the resilience indicator. Additionally, structures with seismic isolation bearings exhibit lower resilience indicators compared with those with buckling restrained braces; For the structures with buckling restrained braces, the resilience indicator decreases as the stiffness of the braces increases; For seismic isolation arrangements, the smaller the bearing stiffness, the larger the relative inter-story displacement angle, and when the base shear approaches the minimum limit value prescribed by the code, the resilience indicator is minimized. This configuration meets the resilience level 2 requirements for sports stadiums and facilitates the functional recovery after an earthquake. The correlation between toughness and structural stiffness and strength proposed in this paper can be used for preliminary assessment of toughness, guiding the selection and layout of similar structures, and then the forward design of toughness can be achieved.