Trustees approve $55M athletics facility upgrade

The IU board of trustees unanimously approved a $55 million plan to improve several athletic fields at its scheduled meeting Friday afternoon.\nThe plan includes construction of a four-story building that will enclose the north end zone of Memorial Stadium, the construction of an Indiana Basketball Development Center and the construction of a new baseball and softball complex.\n"We're doing a great deal to enhance, in total, our facilities for all of our sports folks," IU President Adam Herbert said at the meeting in the Frangipani Room of the Indiana Memorial Union.\nThe Memorial Stadium North End Zone Project will house an exercise area overlooking the field for student athletes, new coaching and administrative offices, a press room and, on the fourth floor, a hall of fame to display IU's athletic accomplishments.\nThe Indiana Basketball Development Center will serve as the new headquarters of men's and women's basketball. It will feature practice courts to which players will have 24/7 access, locker rooms, offices and a strength and conditioning area.\nThe Hoosier Baseball and Softball Complex, which will be located just north of Mellencamp Pavilion and Indiana Tennis Center, will house both softball and baseball fields, indoor batting cages, offices and locker rooms.\nIn presenting the project to the board of trustees Wednesday, both IU men's basketball coach Kelvin Sampson and IU football coach Terry Hoeppner stressed the necessity of the new facilities for better recruiting, with which the board seemed to sympathize.\n"I know coaches are in a difficult position recruiting top athletes," trustee Clarence Boone said. "They bring them here, show them the facilities and, in a lot of cases, they're not much better than what they had in high school. Then they go somewhere else."\nThe facility upgrades are similar to what other Big Ten schools such as Penn State, Michigan State, Ohio State and Wisconsin have done in recent years.\nThe additions to Memorial Stadium are still in the design stage and will take about 10 months to finish, then another 16 months to actually build.\nThe Indiana Basketball Development Center and baseball and softball complex designs should be finalized in six months. It will take about 18 months to build the basketball center and about 12 months to build baseball and softball complex.\nNo part of the project will be paid for with tuition increases or extra fees to students. Instead, $45 million is coming from athletics department revenue from projects such as the Big Ten Channel, scheduled to go on the air in August 2007. An additional $10 million is coming from private gifts to the University.\n"I think this is a wonderful project," Vice President of the board Patrick Shoulders said. "And it's sports money paying for sports facilities. It's not taking a dime away from any other programs."\nThe athletics department is also currently reviewing a plan to either renovate or \nreplace Assembly Hall, a plan that could be voted on as early as November, board President Steve Ferguson told The \nAssociated Press. That project could cost more than $120 \nmillion.