Cliff Williams | Opelika-Auburn News

Auburn’s $90 million plan to build a brand-new arena for men’s and women’s basketball started off as a much simpler project.

In January 2006, athletic director Jay Jacobs, men’s basketball coach Jeff Lebo, women’s coach Nell Fortner and a handful of other athletics officials met with AU trustees Bobby Lowder and John Blackwell. The meeting was to discuss the possibility of building a practice facility for the two basketball teams, which had to fight dozens of other events for practice time at Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum.

According to Jacobs, Lowder and Blackwell weren’t satisfied by the prospect of building a $25- or $30-million practice facility. The two trustees wanted to think bigger.

“They said, ‘We’ve got to do something different,’ ” Jacobs said, recalling the conversation Friday during a groundbreaking ceremony on the site of the new arena.
Jacobs, Lowder, Blackwell, Fortner, Lebo and more than 100 other AU employees — including university president Jay Gogue — gathered at the worksite, just north of Beard-Eaves, to officially open the project.

Construction actually began in mid-July, and the first steel pillars have begun to jut upward from the foundation. The project is scheduled to be completed in July 2010.

Lebo, like Jacobs, credited the meeting with Lowder and Blackwell for beginning the arena-building process, which culminated in final approval by the full Board of Trustees this June.

“It was an amazing meeting,” Lebo said of the 2006 gathering. “I’m just very thankful for Mr. Lowder’s vision of thinking a little bit outside the box.”

The arena is being built near the intersection of Wire Road and Roosevelt Drive, northwest of Beard-Eaves and adjacent to the university’s new dorms, which are slated to open in August 2009.

The new arena, which does not yet have a name, will host the men’s and women’s basketball teams for games, practices, weight-lifting and meetings. It will also include the university’s ticket office, the athletic department’s Lovelace Museum, a retail store for AU-branded merchandise and more.

AU trustee Paul Spina, the president pro tempore of the AU Board of Trustees, also spoke at Friday’s ceremony.

“People say we’re spending $90 million on this facility,” Spina said. “We’re not. We’re investing that money. We’re investing it in basketball.”

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