Collegiate athletic departments, both large and small, have been involved in a facilities arms race that has only escalated in recent years.
Franklin College just got a good bit of help with its efforts to keep pace.
On Monday morning, school president Kerry Prather announced a $1 million commitment from Johnson Memorial Health to establish a new athletic facility on campus.
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The Johnson Memorial Health Athletics Annex, which will be located just south of Spurlock Center, will add a second on-campus weight room as well as an open indoor turf practice space that will feature retractable baseball and softball batting cages as well a similar area for use by the golf teams.
Prather said that there is no official timetable for completion, “other than as soon as possible.” The project is still in its infancy, and the school still needs to raise a little bit of additional funding, so having the facility ready by the start of the 2021-22 school year is unlikely. But it may not take much longer than that.
Franklin College athletic director Andy Hendricks called the project — the first since a series of additions and renovations in 2011 — “long overdue” and “much needed” at a school where more than 40 percent of the student body competes in at least one sport.
“It makes us a little bit more competitive with the (Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference),” Hendricks said. “Our athletes come here and expect to compete at a high level, and we want to provide the resources to let them do that.
“Athletics remains a staple part of the educational experience here, and I don’t see that changing.”
The need for additional athletic space on the Franklin campus will never be more apparent than in the coming months, when all of the Grizzlies’ fall, winter and spring sports seasons will be heavily overlapping with one another.
“It’s going to be controlled chaos,” Hendricks said. “And while we won’t be able to take advantage of this new space, obviously, this year, we’re going to learn real quickly how valuable that space is going to be in the future, because this spring is going to be a puzzle to put together in terms of where we’re going to put everybody.”
The renovation of Stewart “Red” Faught Stadium a decade ago, along with the addition of facilities for tennis, softball and track and field in Grizzly Park, brought Franklin College’s outdoor athletic spaces in line with the upper echelon of NCAA Division III schools.
The construction of the Johnson Memorial Health Athletics Annex is the first step in doing the same with the indoor facilities, Prather says.
“We’ve got a couple of ideas,” he said. “None that we’re ready to share publicly right now, but essentially, what we have serves us well but not broadly enough. So we’re looking at several different ideas for how to enhance this, and this is just the first step in that process.”
