The Miners' practice facility has not seen a major renovation in more than twenty-five years, and Athletic Director Frank Alcott says that is starting to cost the program recruits. He has a plan to fix it, if he can find the money.
Alcott’s plan, presented to the board of trustees’ athletics committee, would proceed in three phases over roughly four years. The first phase, budgeted at $9.6 million, would rebuild the Miners’ weight room and add a dedicated sports medicine and rehabilitation wing. A second phase, budgeted at $5.8 million, would replace the practice facility’s roof and HVAC system, addressing what Alcott called “a building that gets uncomfortably hot for August workouts and uncomfortably cold by December.” A third phase, budgeted at $3 million, would renovate locker rooms across several sports that Alcott said have not been meaningfully updated since the facility opened.
“Recruits and their families notice these things immediately when they walk through the door,” Alcott told the committee. “We’re competing for the same players as schools that built brand-new practice facilities in the last five years, and we’re doing it with a weight room that hasn’t changed since I was an assistant coach here myself.”
Basketball success adds urgency
Alcott’s pitch comes as the Miners’ men’s basketball program opens a season with its highest preseason conference ranking in a decade, a run of success Alcott said has raised the stakes for the university’s facility investment. “If we let this moment pass without backing it up with real infrastructure, we’re telling recruits and coaches across every sport in this department that success here doesn’t get rewarded,” he said. He also cited the women’s basketball and rowing programs specifically as sports he said have outgrown their current training space, though he said the current three-phase plan focuses primarily on facilities shared across multiple sports rather than sport-specific upgrades.
We are not asking to build something extravagant. We are asking to stop being the only program in our conference still training in a building from a different era of college athletics.
Frank Alcott, Athletic Director, Bellwater State University
Trustees raise cost concerns
Not every trustee embraced the full scope of the proposal during Tuesday’s presentation. Board member Harold Vance questioned whether the university should commit $18.4 million to athletics facilities at a moment when the university is separately trying to expand lab capacity for its growing biomanufacturing and clean-energy programs, a priority Chancellor Eleanor Castellano has flagged as constrained by state funding formulas tied to overall enrollment. “I support this program, but I want us to be honest that every dollar spent on a weight room is a dollar not spent on a lab bench that a state workforce grant might have otherwise leveraged,” Vance said during the meeting.
Alcott pushed back on framing the two priorities as directly competing, noting that his department’s proposal relies primarily on athletics-specific fundraising and a small allocation from student athletic fees rather than the university’s general academic budget. “This isn’t coming out of the same pool of money as a biology lab,” he said. “I understand the optics of two big-dollar requests landing in front of the board in the same year, but these are structurally different funding streams.”
A vote expected within weeks
Board chair Doreen Kalb said the trustees would not vote on the proposal Tuesday, instructing Alcott’s office to return with a more detailed breakdown of the athletics-specific funding sources before a formal vote, expected within the next several weeks. Kalb said she was broadly supportive of the plan’s first phase but wanted more clarity on how the university would fund the later phases if athletics fundraising fell short of projections. “I don’t want to approve a phase one and then discover two years from now that phases two and three are stalled indefinitely because the money never materialized,” Kalb said.
Alcott said he remains confident the full plan can be funded within four years, pointing to preliminary conversations with several donors, including former Miners athletes now working in Foundry Row’s biotech sector, who he said have expressed interest in the sports medicine wing specifically. “There’s an appetite among our alumni to give back to this program right now, and I’d rather bring the trustees a plan that matches that appetite than come back in five years asking for the same thing after we’ve lost recruits to schools that didn’t wait,” he said.
Alcott’s presentation included comparisons to three conference rivals that have completed similar facility projects in the past five years, each of which he said saw measurable recruiting gains in the two years following construction. He acknowledged the comparison is imperfect, since facilities are only one factor among many in recruiting decisions, but said the pattern was consistent enough across three different programs to take seriously. “I’m not going to stand here and tell the board a new weight room alone wins us a conference championship,” Alcott said. “But I can show you three programs that built something like this and then landed a class of recruits they hadn’t been able to land before, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
The proposal now moves to the full board for further review, with Alcott’s office expected to present updated donor and fundraising figures at the trustees’ next scheduled meeting. Kalb said the board would likely take up a formal vote on at least the plan’s first phase before the end of the semester, though she declined to predict how the committee’s questions about the later phases might affect the final scope of what gets approved.