Huggins: Practice Facility in the Works
December 08, 2007 11:17 AM | General
December 7, 2007
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Coach Bob Huggins confirmed Friday that West Virginia University is moving forward with plans to construct a basketball practice facility for men’s and women’s basketball.
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| Bob Huggins says West Virginia's proposed basketball practice facility will be as nice as any in the country.
Birmingham News photo |
The proposed facility will be located next to the WVU Coliseum above the tennis courts.
“I think it has been in the works for a while,” Huggins said. “(Director of Athletics) Eddie Pastilong had the idea before I got here. We need it. There are too many things that go on in this building that you can’t really practice at times when you need to practice in here and sometimes you can’t practice at all.”
Huggins said the athletic department had been discussing the need for basketball practice facility for the last couple of years.
“Eddie had the idea long before I got here. The first time I talked to Eddie he already knew where he wanted to put the building and basically how it was going to get done,” Huggins said. “They saw a need for it. The notion that it was me is wrong. It was Eddie.”
Villanova recently opened its $18 million practice facility and Kentucky is wrapping up construction on its multi-million dollar facility.
“You look around the country and everybody is getting one,” Huggins said. “Everybody who has a legitimate basketball program has one or is in the process of getting one.”
Huggins admits that having a practice facility is a necessity when it comes to recruiting the best basketball players in the country.
“If you can tell a kid you’ve got a key card or you can put your thumb in the key pass and go in there and shoot whenever you want to shoot, that would be a big selling point for me as a player,” Huggins said. “Guys today want to work on their game. They want to get better.”
Huggins, women's basketball coach Mike Carey, and University administrators spent this fall touring other basketball practice facilities at Kentucky, Virginia and Louisville.
“We try to take the best of all of them,” Huggins said. “I’ve been in a bunch of them so I had already seen probably 10 other ones. We want to build the best one like this place (WVU Coliseum). This place is 37 years old. Look at it - it is a great building.
“You don’t want to build one when five years from now you look and say, ‘God I wish we would have done this or done that.’ You want to do it right the first time like they did with the Coliseum.”
Huggins says the players in the program are getting excited about having their own practice facility.
“Everybody is excited about it. It gives the players a chance to go in and work on their games when they’re not in class,” Huggins said. “Our guys do a lot of things. Between visits to the hospitals and the charity things they do in the community and taking care of their academics – they are all good students and it’s important – it gives them a chance to work on their games when it’s good for them.”
Huggins said funding for the facility will come from private sources.
“This is such a great state with such wonderful people and such pride in the University and the athletic program that it doesn’t surprise me at all (that it will be privately funded),” Huggins said. “It’s not going to surprise me that we’re going to have the funds in a very short period of time.”
A basketball practice facility would be one of the most expensive capital improvement projects the athletic department has ever undertaken. Rough estimates for the facility range from $16 to 20 million according to Russ Sharp, associate athletic director for finance and administration.
Sharp says the facility will be approximately 50,000 square feet and architectural designs could be completed by Christmas.
