“The Athletic Association will complete an Indoor Practice Facility behind Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall, which will enable football, track and other outdoor sports to practice year-round in a climate-controlled facility. Architectural drawings and schematics are being drawn up now and we have begun securing the necessary funds to begin this project. The initial estimate of the facility is $12 million. Projections for completion have yet to be determined but we are hoping to break ground on this project immediately.”
That statement from UGA regarding a new indoor practice facility was not issued recently. In fact, it was written about 17 years ago. It was included in the Bulldogs’ 1998-99 annual report to donors.
“We had a plan,” Vince Dooley, Georgia’s athletic director at the time, acknowledged this past weekend. “The indoor facility itself was excellent and was just what we wanted.”
Nearly two decades later, that project is expected to finally become a reality. The UGA Athletic Association Board of Directors will at its quarterly meeting on Tuesday hear about plans to have an indoor practice facility built somewhere on campus within the next year or so. Exactly when and where is unclear.
Details and timelines for the project have been kept a closely-guarded secret by UGA, which has gone to great lengths to prevent any information being released to the public via Georgia and federal open-record laws. At issue is how much the facility will cost – initial reports estimated about $15 million – and where on campus to put the massive structure.
The athletic board last September approved $400,000 from the annual budget to conduct a feasibility study. Since then, the school has contracted two architectural firms – Collins, Cooper, Carusi of Atlanta and Ratio of Indianapolis – to determine what would be required of such a building. In response to requests from the AJC for documents and communications exchanged between the school and those entities, UGA claims none exists.
“Due to open-records requests, there are no renders or anything other than spoken words,” Georgia Athletic Director Greg McGarity said. “Open records have changed our approach on projects.”
There will be nothing to see on Tuesday either, McGarity claimed. Those architects are expected to make some sort of presentation to the full board when it meets at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. But McGarity doubted that their report would be made public and said he does not expect anything to be put to a vote Tuesday.
“We’re just going to discuss it,” he said. “It will be an item of discussion. We’ll just discuss any issues that deal with the indoor building then. We’re going to walk through some things with our board.”
Whatever Georgia ends up doing, the Bulldogs will be the last team in the Southeastern Conference to do it. The University of Florida last month became the 13th of the league’s 14 schools to decide to add an indoor football facility when it approved a $15 million project slated for completion in September.
Indoor practice facilities are the latest battleground in the facilities arms race that has been raging in college football and the SEC in particular for the better of the last decade or so.
“That’s exactly what it is,” said Dooley, who retired in 2004. “When Florida State got one, Florida had to get one down there. We could get along without one, which we’ve done quite well, but it would certainly be an asset.”
As it is, Georgia will fortunate to have its new facility in place before the 2016 season. To date, it hasn’t even been determined where it could be built.
“A facility of this magnitude takes time,” McGarity said last November “There are many, many steps to taken and they will be. But 2015, it’s not going to happen that quickly.”
Georgia is only five years removed from a $33 million renovation and expansion of the football facilities at the Butts-Mehre complex. That project, officially dedicated in 2010, included the construction of the infamously-inadequate “Nalley Multi-Purpose Building.” At the time, the addition was billed as a fulfillment of UGA’s need for an alternate practice area in case of inclement weather.
“That was never intended to replace an indoor facility,” said Maryland Athletic Director Damon Evans, who was UGA’s athletic director at the time of construction. “It was just a recruiting facility where you could have large gatherings or maybe you could do a few drills now and then. But it wasn’t a replacement for an indoor facility.”
For Evans, the decision to renovate and expand the existing football facilities essentially ended all discussions about an indoor practice facility.
“A lot of it centered on where to build it and if we could do both at the same time,” Evans said. “Mark would’ve had both if he could but we couldn’t at that time and the decision was made that the expansion was needed most. Everybody felt the weight room, training rooms, meeting rooms, all those kinds of things that players need, were more important.”
Both Dooley and Evans ran into the same issues that the Bulldogs are still having to navigate: chiefly, that the building will be too big to easily incorporate into the existing athletic landscape. McGarity said the Bulldogs want a full-size football facility, so preliminary plans call for it being at least 80 yards wide and 140 yards long and tall enough to kick and pass in.
“We had it attached to the Butts-Mehre building and when the final plans were drawn up it was too obtrusive,” Dooley said. “It would have been the ideal location but it just overshadowed everything.”
That’s still a problem. Indications are the area that currently houses the Spec Towns track next to Lumpkin Street is off the table due to its mixed use requirement with the university and local community. Richt would prefer to have it on the site of Georgia’s current facilities, but they just completed tens of thousands dollars in improvements to replace two FieldTurf Fields, re-do the two natural grass fields and add fences and video towers throughout the
Dooley had an alternative plan that would have had the indoor facility built on the site of the current baseball stadium and had Foley Field rebuilt on South Milledge next to the existing soccer and softball facilities. But Foley Field underwent a $12 million renovation in that location that was completed and dedicated this past weekend. So that is not going anywhere.
“I don’t want to get into that,” Dooley said. “Suffice it is to say that, yes, we had plans.”
Decades later, the planning continues.
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