Football Sports

Regents approve design phase of indoor practice facility

Despite the rainy conditions, 29,565 fans showed up to support the Cougars on Halloween night. | Justin Tijerina/The Cougar

TDECU Stadium will soon have an adjacent practice facility, as the UH Board of Regents approved the design phase for the facility on Thursday. | File photo/The Cougar

The Board of Regents gave approval to move forward with the design phase of a $20 million indoor practice facility for football on Thursday.

The facility will be constructed behind the TDECU Stadium Parking Garage and next to the stadium. The space is occupied by a surface parking lot.

“An indoor practice facility will continue to provide the best possible tools for our program to recruit and compete at a national level,” Vice President for Athletics Hunter Yurachek said in a news release. “We are thankful that Dr. Khator and our Board of Regents value this facility’s importance for our program, and more importantly, for our student-athlete experience.”

The announcement of the construction is unsurprising, as a stipulation in head coach Tom Herman’s contract states that his buyout price would decrease if a plan for an indoor facility was not approved by Sept. 1, 2016.

His buyout will decrease by 50 and then 75 percent if the facility is not nearing completion by December 2017 and 2018 respectively.

“This is a vital facility for our program, and we cannot be more appreciative for the vision from our administration in Dr. Khator, Hunter Yurachek and our Board of Regents,” Herman said in a news release. “We emphasize championship preparation with a fanatical effort, and having an indoor facility and a football-specific weight room maximizes our efficiency in competing for championships.”

Construction is scheduled to begin in the fall, depending on if the Board of Regents approves a final design and findings.

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4 Comments

  • Didn’t we just have to bail out an athletics project with the supposedly education-only HEAF money? So if this project is budgeted for $20M, does that include the unspoken 20% overrun that is then billed to the University?

    When does the athletic department start carrying it’s own weight? Currently it runs deficits to the tune of $21M per year – on top of which we can add Tom Herman’s bloated $3M salary.

    Where would our business program be if we spent $200M on it in the span of three years, and paid the Dean $3M per year?

    http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/

    • UH is on par with or better than most P5 schools when it comes to academics. The Board of Regents approved the creation of the College of Arts and a second Health and Biomedical Sciences building is currently under construction. Why wouldn’t we want athletics to compete on the same level?

      The truth is the athletic department will probably never carry its own weight, just like most of the programs on the list you so conveniently provided us. Tell me, when does the English department start carrying its own weigh?

      • >UH is on par with or better than most P5 schools when it comes to academics.

        Wow. No. I mean I love UH more than any student I’ve seen on campus, but we have a looong way to go. Understand that most Big 12 schools are not the academic mean of the P5. The Academic mean of the P5 is Texas A&M – most schools in the P5 are much better than UH, academically.

        >Why wouldn’t we want athletics to compete on the same level?

        Because athletics is by far the most capital intensive program on a per student basis on campus, and it has the most tenuous connection to the University’s mission of educating students. I understand why we want to be competing to get the freshman with the best SAT scores, or for the most grant money, or for the graduates who earn the most. Not entirely sure why it’s important that we win a lot of sportsball championships (if we ever won any).

        We basically own a minor league sports franchise. Competitive implications and “the government owning a private business” aside, that’s fine. The issue is that it isn’t a profit center. It costs the University $21M per year to own this sports franchise. If there was an academic program that ran deficits like that, would we tolerate it? No, of course not and the THECB actively seeks out programs that aren’t a good investment.

        >The truth is the athletic department will probably never carry its own weight, just like most of the programs on the list you so conveniently provided us. Tell me, when does the English department start carrying its own weigh?

        The English Department *does* carry its own weight. It has to, or the University would go bankrupt. The State of Texas doesn’t allocate any funds for the athletic program; it does for the academic ones. Students don’t pay tuition to the Athletic program, they do to the academic ones. Effectively *all* of the University’s revenues come from academic programs, and then on top of that those programs (and the students who attend them) pay a fee to fund the academic program.

        I’m fine with the athletic department running at a deficit…but not a deficit that’s larger than most entire academic departments’ budgets. I’m fine with the athletic department running a large deficit, but not when the effective ‘head’ of the athletic department gets paid $3M per year (more than any academic in the University; more than some department’s entire salary expense).

        I like UH’s athletic department being successful, I really do. But at what cost? If we could have a national championship for $500M per year, would you want that? If you tuition doubled, would you be ok with paying that much to fund athletics at a level required to compete with UT and Stanford?

  • This, coming from the same Regents that say there will be a tuition increase next year because of a lack of state funding while we can’t keep the Stadium we just built filled because we have yet to figure out that we have a huge Latino and International student population that couldn’t care less about American Football. Which makes me wonder: why don’t we have a Men’s Soccer Team? I can’t help but imagine what would happen, since we have a huge Latino population among the student body, if we did?

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