ICYMI: The following is an excerpt from a recent interview with athletics director Mike Bobinski on 'Gold and Black LIVE' as he addresses the future of Ross-Ade Stadium You can watch the full interview here. Bobinski is in segments two and three.
GoldandBlack.com: Tell us about the importance of raising money for these new projects.
Bobinski: We’re working hard to keep it all in an economically sound and viable structure. The objective at Purdue has always been to run the program self sufficiently. We are very fortunate these last couple of years, we’ve had positive net results. What we are limiting as we look ahead (ribbon board, South End Zone score board, schematic design project for Ross Ade), all of that is being funded through private donations. Every single dollar. There’s not a dollar coming out of our budget because there is no room in our budget.
As we look ahead to the bigger Ross Ade transformation project that will occur, we will raise every dollar privately to make that happen. We don’t have the capacity to take on additional debt right now. It would be an unwise move and I would be saddling my successors with a debt load that would be unwise and unfair.
GoldandBlack.com: What should we anticipate of the Ross-Ade project moving forward?
Bobinski: While we have the funding in place for the schematic design project, we haven’t started the work yet. That is what’s next: taking the concepts that we worked on the last eight or nine months that were sort of 30,000-foot broad what-ifs, how it might look as we move forward and some of the major elements we might want to deal with and really taking that down to a much greater degree of detail. (The goal is to) really make some decisions about what’s in, what’s out, or what are the alternates in the project. Then putting together a plan potentially for how we might sequence the project if we don’t get all the dollars up front.
Our great hope is that we can deliver this project in one big chunk. I think that’s the most impactful and the most meaningful way to do it. But, that’s all going to be dictated by the pace of fundraising and the ability of us to make all that happen.
This schematic design project will happen over the next eight to 10 months. It will take some real time and it will take some real work and it will take some cost estimating once you get the design, then you can really go out to the construction work and ask “What does it really cost to do these things?” There’s some rough estimation on the front end so you’re not dreaming up stuff you clearly cannot do. But once you get to the point of these are the elements we want to see included, this is the program that we want to move forward with, what’s it going to cost? And then we’ll really know what our target is fundraising wise that will inform us how long this thing takes to actually get done.
Ideally, if we could have this thing underway in three years, you’ll have a year of design, a year-and-a-half of fundraising, that would be the most realistic. If we could do it sooner, I’d love to do it sooner. But we have to understand that there’s a process and a systematic way we’ll have to go about this. It’s exciting.
The concepts that I’ve seen would be unbelievably transforming for Ross-Ade and change the experience and set us up for years of having a facility that would support success at really high levels. I’m really excited about this next phase because we’re really going to take those concepts and get it to the next level of detail.
GoldandBlack.com: What would a transformative idea look like?
Bobinski: Right now, Ross-Ade as it’s currently situated, provides a really limited set of seating options and experience. You’ve got the main bowl or you’re up in the Pavilion either in the Shively Club, the Buchanan Club, or in a suite. So there’s a huge gap in terms what we have to offer in terms of opportunities.
As we’ve surveyed lots of folks, and as we’ve visited Major League baseball parks and Major League soccer stadiums, (we've begun to learn from) people that are doing lots of heavy market research about how people want to consume sporting events these days. There is clearly a desire for different kinds of spaces, different kinds of seating options. Whether it be patios, whether it be rails where people stand. Lots of different things. ...Smaller open air loge boxes where four to six people have a semi-private space, but it’s their space. There’s a little more room to move around, you don’t have the knees in the back and your knees in somebody else’s back and the beers being spilled on you.
The second part will be to try to connect the game (to our fans). When people leave their seat to go to the concourse to get concessions or go to the restroom and you go up in the concourse, you might as well be somewhere else because the game is happening someplace else.
Our hope and our desire (and one of the ideas that is being discussed) is that we’re going to peel off the upper level of Ross-Ade from the vomitories up. Right now from there up is all steel decking which is starting to age out. So we would like to peel that off, create a brand new mezzanine level, which would provide an open air view into the field all the way around the concourse. We would then connect the concourse all the way around the stadium as opposed to right now in the south end you kind of run into a brick wall. So we’ll have this brand new upper deck which will clean the concourses up, open them up, provide that view of the field, improve concession (food and beverage). All of those things will be updated and modernized and do things the way that folks that are on a cutting edge of those things nationally where you have local food service providers, you have more communal seating, you’ve got festival vibe around the concourse area.
Then in the South end zone, for years we’ve talked about some type of a structure down there and what that is going to ultimately be, there are a couple different versions, one is changing that into maybe a student section; creating an environment and a more intimidating home field advantage is part of what we’ve asked the architects to think about. How do we change that dynamic and make Ross-Ade a little bit more of an intimidating place to play?
The north end (of Ross-Ade Stadium) is 40 feet from the end zone to the first seat. There’s a big gap of space. So one of the more "out there" ideas is maybe taking down the whole north end zone and moving everything in closer; creating a much more intimate, closed in area. We may or may not be able to pull that off, but one of the things that does is potentially allow you to have your game support facilities for football in the north end, maybe with connectivity to the Football Performance Complex. All of that could happen in the north end as opposed to the south end where it’s always been imagined. Maybe the south end becomes that brand new wall of students. There’s lots of exciting possibilities that I think (those ideas) will change things.
And connectivity, that is something that we heard loud and clear from the surveys that we did. Football has down time, that’s the nature of the game. There’s TV breaks, there’s quarter breaks, there’s halftime breaks. People want to be connected and that’s not going anywhere. Our world is not going to become less connected, it’s going to be more connected so we’ve got to tackle that in this project for sure.
And then the current Pavilion (the "press box"). It’s a great facility, we’ve got lots of nice elements, but it’s been as it’s been now for 15 years (it was fully completed in time for the 2003 season). It’s time to refresh the finishes, refresh the look and feel in the Pavilion to make sure that those seating options continue to retain value. S
So really (in summation) it will be the upper level, creating that mezzanine level, cleaning up the concourse, providing the view into the field, a much wider variety of seating options that speak to the way fans of today want to experience games. And then that structure in the south end zone that will either be a traditional seating area with club spaces and all of that, but whatever we do, there will be field level club opportunities built into either the north or south ends, potentially both, as we look ahead.
Again, all of this is dollar and resource dependent, but there are lots of exciting possibilities to really modernize Ross-Ade and make it a really distinctive facility. We’re never going to be 100,000 seats. We’re not going to outnumber anybody in terms of our scope or our size. But we want our place to be something where people say, "Wow. What a facility Ross-Ade is. It is the best facility its size in our league."
GoldandBlack.com: Is there still any thought of raising the Hilltop Apartments (directly west of Ross-Ade Stadium_ into some type of athletic housing while still including normal student housing as well?
Bobinski: The campus master plan that was done within the last year includes a how far down the road is a to be determined. It’s not our project, it would be a university project. The current Hilltop Apartments are still functioning, they’re still being used. Clearly they don’t have a lot of life left in them.
At some point we would envision those apartments coming down and whether it be a new residence hall that’s got an athletic piece to it, but also potentially a closing of that road on the west side of the stadium creating a new plaza, sort of green space tailgating social space that would be supportive of football game days, that’s exciting to us all. We’ve talked about all of that with our campus facilities folks and the master planners and they think that’s an idea that at some point will find it’s way to reality. I don’t know if its one year, two years, three years, but it’s still in the conversation.
GoldandBlack.com: Are there any other non-football related facility projects that are on your radar?
Bobinski: There is a never ending supply of things that we would like to address, and again, (they are) all resource and planning dependent. The next thing that’s coming to Mackey is renovation of our men’s and women’s basketball locker rooms. We’ve got good space (now) but the space could be better utilized. It could be more responsive to the way our teams practice, train, use that space. So we’ve got some designs done already for that. The one will begin fundraising to make that happen and that’s probably a year and a half away from actually getting done but we feel really good about that.
We’ve got brand new video boards in Holloway Gym this year. There are things that we would like to do in and around our outdoor track which is buried in the middle of campus. As of right now it’s going to stay there. But again, the campus master plan envisions that at some point potentially moving out to the Northwest Site (where soccer, baseball, softball and tennis currently reside). There’s no timeline on that whatsoever. But that would be dependent on other campus developments sort of pushing it out to that Northwest Site. That could happen some day, but that would also necessitate probably the move of the indoor track because you want those things to be connected some how, some way.
We've got things we’d like to do out at our baseball and softball complexes. There’s work at the golf course we’d like to get done. The bunkers at Kampen (golf course) need to be redone. There’s some development projects we’d love to do out there. Our clubhouse could be better. Our Spurgeon Facility, which is a great (indoor golf) facility needs to be updated and refreshed. There’s a never ending cycle of making sure you stay on top of things and you don’t ever let them reach a critical point.
Special thanks to Gold and Black student assistant Rachel Jones for her assistance with this story.
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