Texas football releases renderings of new indoor practice facility
For almost 20 years, the Texas Longhorns football program’s indoor practice option has been “the bubble,” a once innovative building which has needed replacement for quite some time. While Texas continued to use the Frank Denius Fields and the bubble for its practice needs, other programs built their own indoor practice facilities that lapped what Texas had to offer.
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On Friday, Texas revealed how it’s going to catch up. The Longhorn football Twitter account released renderings of the new indoor practice facility, a project that will bring Texas much closer to the front of the pack in the ongoing facilities arms race.
The facility will be located where the current Steve Hicks School of Social work sits at 20th Street and Robert Dedman Dr. It will be just south of the Recreational Sports Center and just north of the Jamail Texas Swimming Center.
Texas athletics director Chris Del Conte said in February that a new indoor practice facility was on the horizon.
“One of the things we’re in the process of right now is identifying the proper place for the indoor football facility along with the field,” Del Conte said during the virtual town hall meeting. “We have great plans in place for that. We’re just looking to see where it fits on our campus (and) the right proximity in terms of football training every single day. They’ve got to go to class, they’ve got to see (senior associate athletics director for student services) Marnie (Binfield) and our entire academic staff constantly. That’s why they’re here. At the same time, they’ve got to get to practice.”
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Del Conte continued: “Once we get the practice facility identified and we start raising money for that, we’re going to go to grass at DKR. It’s just a timing issue, but I can assure you we all want to go to grass. (Steve Sarkisian) wants to go to grass, but we have to be on FieldTurf until that time because of the proximity for where we’re at and how much usage a field gets.
“We know the practice facility is coming. Hopefully, at the latest, in two months I’ll tell you exactly where it’s going to go. We’ve hired an architect. We’re in the process of designing it in several locations. Once that’s designed, we’ll go to President (Jay) Hartzell for approval and then we’ll go to the board of trustees and move forward.”
The needed addition for the program will be within walking distance of where the team’s most often used facilities are in the south end zone. The Longhorns have had to take busses from the Moncrief-Neuhaus complex to the Denius Fields in the past, and have sometimes even just walked between the two locations.
That walk will be a lot shorter upon construction of the new facility just a block away, and it will be to a facility with the latest innovations and technological advancements
