The college sports arms race takes on different forms as the years progress, and we are in the era of indoor practice facilities, nutrition centers and student housing.
If a school is still in the process of trying to upgrade its weight-training facility and football offices, it is behind the times. That’s so late 2000’s, early 2010’s.
Arizona of all schools wants an indoor practice facility for its football program. Miami yearns for one badly because it is the last ACC team without one or plans for one after Boston College announced recently that an indoor facility will be part of its $200 million in athletics facilities upgrades. (Rendering pictured above)
It snows in Boston. Not a bad idea to get some work in when it’s below freezing outside. Isn’t the weather mostly nice at places like Miami and Tucson during the school year, when practices are mostly held? An indoor facility at Miami and Arizona is like investing money in a water park in the Bahamas, right?
“We need one,” Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez said after a recent spring practice. “I didn’t think we needed one because it never rains here, right? But because of the heat in the summer and with some of the storms you get in August, we need to have one.
“I think the school is open to the idea. (Arizona athletic director) Greg (Byrne) has been great to work with, and to talk about it with. It’s not going to happen overnight, but I think it’s something that has been recognized as something we need.”
Not to put words in Rodriguez’s mouth, but what he really wants to say is that if other schools have an indoor practice facility, Arizona needs one too to keep up with the times. Recruiting is the ultimate factor. A program without all the bells and whistles can’t compete, or so is the belief. Never mind that programs such as Stanford and UCLA exist without an indoor facility (at least for now).
Arch-rival Arizona State has featured an inflatable indoor facility, the Verde Dicky Dome, (above) since 2008. Byrne wants to do one better than ASU by having a permanent structure. Guess what the Sun Devils will do after that happens down the road in Tucson.
Boston College has actually practiced in an inflatable bubble as well. The program’s upgrades will make the facility permanent.
Miami officials look at what Boston College is doing and start to sweat. They do not want the embarrassment of being the only conference school without an indoor facility. That’s at least how they feel privately. Publicly, they have let it be known that the Miami metro area is among the wettest in the United States. The Hurricanes annually encounter rain-delayed, postponed or cancelled practices because of inclement weather.
In order to construct an indoor facility, Miami reportedly needs at least $17 million from donations to get the ball rolling. Few have stepped forward as of now. Byrne has resorted to asking incoming students to pay a $200 athletics fee to help fund such necessary projects that include stadium upgrades, a plan that is on hold for now until the notion gathers more support.
“I think it would certainly help from a recruiting standpoint, but the most important thing we look at is that it can help us be as good as we can be,” Byrne said about the indoor facility. “Obviously, it would benefit football significantly. There could be other sports, such as soccer, softball and baseball, even track could have times training inside of there.”
The construction of student-athlete housing facilities has been in the news for the last couple of years but that trend will continue to develop into more of a need for programs to keep a recruiting edge. The NCAA forbids athletic dorms, similar to an Olympic village, because it does not want to separate athletes from the student body, but programs get around that by allowing a majority of non-athletes to reside in the complex.
In the last five years, the basketball programs at Kentucky and Kansas and football programs at Auburn, Ohio State and Oklahoma have constructed extravagant living quarters that mostly house their athletes among a majority of non-athletes.
Oklahoma’s $75 million Headington Hall, for example, is within walking distance of Memorial Stadium and includes suites for more than 500 students. More than 100 of them include football players. The complex has a game room, 75-seat movie theater and the Sam Bradford Training Table. The quarterback along with running back Adrian Peterson combined to donate $1 million to the facility. The building is named after Tim Headington, a former Oklahoma tennis player who donated $10 million toward its construction.
Nutrition centers will come more into vogue as programs increasingly allocate funds to build them. In a departure from the past, the NCAA in the last year has allowed for student-athletes to have free access to food and beverages, a significant recruiting tool for programs that can adequately showcase the meals and nourishment provided.
Many institutions already have facilities devoted to nutrition centers within their training areas. Indiana recently announced that a nutrition center will be constructed as part of its $170 million in facilities upgrades.
Indiana alum Mark Cuban, the flamboyant owner of the Dallas Mavericks, may have started his own trend by donating $5 million to his alma mater for the construction of a technology center within Assembly Hall. The Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology will be built to allow students and coaches access to 3-D, multi-camera and virtual reality technology, some of which is not commercially available yet.
Others will view that facility as giving the Hoosiers a competitive advantage and what their own. Programs such as Stanford, Arkansas, Auburn and Clemson have already used virtual reality technology to help prepare quarterbacks and other position players for real-time decision-making during a game, which is a way to gain a mental edge when the actual game is played.
Fitting that technology will enter the recruiting arms race in college athletics. Technology always evolves much like programs discovering new ways to one-up the other. What will be cooked up next?
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