UK set to approve $30 million for state-of-the-art football, track facilities
The University of Kentucky athletics department will soon begin building a dedicated indoor track-and-field facility and upgrades to the Nutter Field House to better accommodate the needs of the Wildcats’ football program.
Pending approval from the school’s Board of Trustees — which was anticipated to come during its Friday afternoon meeting — those projects, along with updates to the video boards at Kroger Field, will comprise a $30 million series of construction and renovations on the southern end of UK’s campus.
All of the funds for the proposed projects are private.
“These are steps in our program we always desire to take, and we’ve got lots of things still that we want to get done in other areas as well,” UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart said. “But this is something that’s a really important step for a lot of our programs. In total, these projects affect roughly 60 to 65 percent of all our student-athletes. So it has a dramatic effect on the different things that we do and the health and welfare of our young people.”
The football renovations have received the most publicity in recent months; a promised pigskin-minded re-imagining of the Nutter Field House, erected as a multi-purpose facility in 1992, was one of the major factors in UK retaining head coach Mark Stoops, who in 2021 guided the program to its second 10-win season in the last four years.
Those improvements will cost $5 million. The synthetic turf currently inside the building will be replaced with a wall-to-wall shock pad covered with an infill turf system. Revisions to the circulation and venting systems will occur and new LED lighting will be installed, in addition to other cosmetic touch-ups.
As for the video boards, those have reached the end of their life expectancy and the ability to replace malfunctioning screen panels has grown cumbersome due to advancements in technology. At the time of their installation in 2011, the two end zone video boards at Kroger Field (then called Commonwealth Stadium) were among the largest in the country. That proposal calls for $5 million to go to the installation of a new system, which could be a single video board in one end zone or two new units.
UK likes having two scoreboards — “We think that’s good for our fans and sort of encloses our stadium,” said Barnhart — but that’ll ultimately be decided through the request-for-proposal process. That plan also calls for a budget of $5 million, and does not call for changes to the audio system at Kroger Field.
“We’re excited to see what people come back to us with, Barnhart said. “… We’ve put a new scoreboard up in Memorial Coliseum. We’ve put two new scoreboards up in softball and soccer, and those have turned out remarkably well. They are like watching high-def television in a stadium. I mean, it is a really clear, great picture.”
Building the dedicated indoor track-and-field venue will cost an estimated $20 million. Barnhart confirmed Thursday that the facility will be constructed in part on the site where Cliff Hagan Stadium, formerly the school’s baseball field, currently stands. The facility will have a hydraulic track, which enables the raising and lowering of the surface and is the kind of surface on which NCAA championships are contested. It will allow for Kentucky to once again host the indoor Southeastern Conference championships; as of this school year, only three other SEC schools have indoor facilities with hydraulic tracks (Arkansas, South Carolina and Texas A&M).
UK track-and-field coach Lonnie Green described it as a game-changer in recruiting.
“If an athlete the caliber of Sydney McLaughlin walks into our facility, she’ll go, ‘Whoa this is where I’m gonna train?’” Greene said. “’I already love the institution. I already love the coaching staff and the team. But this is what I get to work with?’ The sky’s the limit at that point.”
The new facility for track and field will also include 2,500 square feet of fully-conditioned storage space for UK’s band program.
Notes
▪ In the lead-up to the proposals, there was some scuttlebutt that new turf would also be installed at Kroger Field. It’s not happening. “We’re in good shape on that,” Barnhart said. “We run tests on it every year, we run safety tests to make sure that it’s in a good spot. We always look at that very carefully. That’s a safety, health and welfare issue for us, so we’re not going to compromise it.”
▪ UK has undergone feasibility and design planning for further renovations at Memorial Coliseum, but that is “a significantly large project,” and one that has gotten more expensive due to the rise in construction materials during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve had to rethink how we’re going to do it,” said Barnhart, but he hopes to get it moving in the right direction as soon as possible. “That facility affects so many of our other student-athletes on that side of campus and we want to get that one fixed up. That’s clearly on our minds.”
Memorial Coliseum is the primary home venue of several women’s programs, including the basketball, volleyball and gymnastics teams.
This story was originally published February 18, 2022 at 7:32 AM.
