Bye, bye bubble. The new state of the art Texas football practice facility is almost complete. The end of spring football also means UT has practiced for a final time in the old bubble practice facility. The new building will open in July. Texas coach Steve Sarkisian showed off the new building’s progress.
Years ago, Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte kicked off construction of the new practice compound. The construction will cost roughly $70 million and it is located just South of Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium, between the University of Texas’s student recreation center and the Jamail Texas Swimming Center.
Should be ready mid-July,” Del Conte said. “It’s going to be awesome.”
The facility will include two outdoor practice fields and a 60-foot-high indoor facility/practice field that will be partially underground, so the roofline is on the same plane as the neighboring Moody Center and indoor basketball/rowing practice facility.
For more than 20 years, Texas has practiced at the Frank Denius Fields on Red River and Dean Keeton at the bubble. Back in the 2000s, the bubble was the best solution with little funding and space available. But the area around DKR has had a total transformation since then.
One of the few academic areas near DKR is the Steve Hicks School of Social Work. A big challenge and delay in constructing the new practice facility was finding a home for it. The School of Social Work is now will move into the current location of the McCombs School of Business when it moves into its new location at the old Dobie Mall on Guadalupe.
The University of Texas at Austin began demolition of Dobie Garage at Whitis Avenue and 20th Street this week in preparation for its future 17-story undergraduate business school building, Mulva Hall. The building is scheduled to open for Fall 2028.
Sark can’t wait.
“The way it’s set up with the indoor field and the outdoor field really line together,” Sark said. “They’re lined the same. We can use the outdoor field and indoor field simultaneously, whether it’s good on good work or offense is inside, defense is outside. Next period we can switch. So from that standpoint, from a practice standpoint, the efficiency of practice. The safety of practice. The room at practice. The ability to use the whole field when you’re taking shots and throwing the ball down the field, it allows you to do those things.”
After moving in and using the new facility for a while, Sarkisian and Del Conte will then decide if they want to put natural grass back in DKR or stay with a type of artificial turf. With the team practicing so much at the stadium in recent years, natural turf would have been impractical until now.
This article originally appeared on Longhorns Wire: Bye, Bye Bubble! Sark shows off new Texas football practice facility
Reporting by Trey Luerssen, Longhorns Wire / Longhorns Wire
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
