March Madness could be coming to the Hill as soon as next year.
Construction will begin March 23 on a major renovation to Cousens Gymnasium, the centerpiece of which involves rotating the basketball court so that it becomes an NCAA regulation-size facility. Upon its completion — slated for around Aug. 15 — the project will allow the Tufts' men's and women's basketball teams to host NCAA Tournament games as early as next season.
The renovation received a final go-ahead from the Administration and Finance Committee during a Board of Trustees meeting held over the first weekend of February.
"There haven't been really any major renovations to the athletics plan at Tufts for decades, so everybody just believes that improving athletics is absolutely a priority," Trustee Secretary Linda Dixon said. "The trustees just feel that it's way overdue to improve athletics at Tufts. They're very much in favor of it."
Alhough Tufts will not host any more basketball games this season — the last game at the existing Cousens Gym was played on Saturday, a 71-57 victory by the women's basketball team in the first round of the NESCAC Tournament — renovations will not commence until after the final games on the Div. III basketball calendar take place on March 21.
According to Assistant Athletics Director for Facilities/Fields and Game Management Tim Troville, this timeline was devised so that the women's basketball team, which is still alive in the conference tournament and is likely to receive a bid to the NCAA Tournament, can continue practicing in Cousens Gym for the remainder of its season.
Troville added that while Aug. 15 is "a soft end date," he is confident that the renovation will be completed ahead of the start of the fall 2009 sports season, during which time the volleyball team will use Cousens Gym for its practices and home games. "It's a pretty aggressive timeline, but we're pretty confident that the construction company can meet that timeframe," Troville said. "We really wanted to make sure we got the project finished prior to classes beginning and also to not affect the volleyball schedule. We want to make sure our team has adequate preseason training time as well as to not affect their competition schedule."
The renovation will include improvements to other parts of the Cousens complex besides the court rotation, according to Troville. A brand-new sound system will be installed to create "a significant upgrade for the entertainment value." Furthermore, as part of a plan to modernize the facility's lobby, both the basketball coaches' offices as well as the public bathrooms will be refurbished. On the exterior of the building, a handicapped-accessible ramp will be built to the right of the stairs, which are also receiving a facelift.
While other phases of the plan to overhaul Tufts' athletics facilities — which also includes the expansion of the fitness center as well as the construction of international-sized squash courts and a state-of-the-art swimming pool — are on hold amidst the current economic downturn, the Cousens renovation will proceed over the coming months for two reasons, according to Athletics Director Bill Gehling.
First, it was decidedly cheaper compared to other major components of the project, expediting the process of securing the appropriate funding.
"It was not necessarily that this piece was a higher priority than other pieces; it had to do with the fact that this piece was much less expensive," Gehling said. "For example, expanding the fitness center was an extremely expensive piece, and so even if we wanted to do that first, we didn't have the money to do it."
"The fact is they had the money in hand for this piece of the project, and this was the only piece of project that they had the money in hand to go forward with," Gehling continued.
The university has raised $15.7 million to cover the costs of the Cousens renovation and parts of future improvements to the fitness center, Director of Advancement Communications and Donor Relations Christine Sanni said in an e-mail. Of those funds, $10 million came from a donation made by Steve Tisch (A '71) in 2007, while an additional $5 million was raised by members of the Board of Overseers for Athletics.
In addition to having the necessary finances on hand, the university's decision to move forward with the basketball court renovation also stems from changes to the building code system in Massachusetts, according to Gehling and Troville. While the design plans for the renovation were conceived under the sixth edition of the Basic Building Code, the state's Department of Public Safety recently updated to a seventh edition. The change necessitated that the university acquire the permits for the renovation before the sixth edition expired.
"Since everything was secured and we were ready to go forward, it was really important that we get it done under the sixth edition because that's what the architectural plans were drawn under," Troville said. "If we were to not get our permits on time, then we would have to revisit the architectural drawings and the whole process all over again, which would have cost us double the amount of money because we would have had to redesign everything."
The most significant outcome achieved from the Cousens renovation will be the widening of the basketball court to meet NCAA standards. In its current state, the court measures 86 feet long, eight feet too short of what the NCAA deems regulation-size. As a result, Tufts has never been eligible to host NCAA Tournament games, something that has forced both the men's and women's basketball teams to travel in situations where they might have otherwise earned a home postseason game.
Upon gaining an NCAA Tournament berth during the 1994-95 season, for instance, the third-seeded men's basketball team was supposed to have home-court advantage in its first-round matchup against sixth-seeded Salem State. But Cousens' size issues moved the game to a neutral site in Waltham, Mass., where the Jumbos suffered an 86-80 upset loss to the Vikings.
Last year, the women's basketball team — the only squad in its four-team regional to be ranked in the D3hoops.com Top 25 poll — also could have conceivably hosted first- and second-round tournament games. Ineligible to do so, however, the Jumbos instead were forced to take a four-hour bus ride to Newburgh, N.Y. and play in front of a decidedly partisan crowd on the campus of Mount St. Mary College.
Among those most directly impacted by Cousens' smaller size, women's basketball coach Carla Berube welcomed the university's decision to — quite literally — even the playing field.
"Even in the regular season, we notice a difference in the court when we go to an opponent's gym," she said. "It's hard to go from one court to the other. We'll be excited to be able to have a regulation court, and they're doing some renovations to the whole Cousens facility. We're excited about that and the chance to hopefully host NCAAs sometime down the road."
But the benefits of holding postseason events on campus will reach more than just the university's two basketball programs.
"I think hosting NCAA Tournament games are very, very exciting events on campus," Gehling said. "They tend to draw large crowds and really build spirit. I think in the cases where we've had those opportunities — in recent years, we had it with field hockey, men's lacrosse, women's soccer, softball, to name a few — they tend to be the type of events that draw the community together."
The mechanics of the renovation will involve rotating the existing court 90 degrees so that it runs parallel to College Avenue. To make room, roughly five rows of the existing concrete and wood seating will be removed from either side of the court and replaced by collapsible bleacher seating in the areas where the two baskets are currently situated, according to Troville.
Approximately three rows of the existing seating — a trademark feature of a facility that was originally constructed in 1931 — will remain in place, a move that will create a fan section situated about 10 feet above floor level behind each of the baskets, Troville said. The decision is one of the measures taken to ensure that the renovation doesn't tamper with Cousens' famous old-school ambiance.
"We all share a love for the historic nature of Cousens Gym," Gehling said. "Our goal in doing this is to do it in a way that creates a regulation-size basketball court, which we don't have right now, without losing the key feel of Cousens Gym. For me, the key feel of Cousens Gym has to do with those stairs going up and down the wall on one side and the arches on the other side, and all of that is going to remain. We're going to be losing most of those seats, but not all of them, so we'll at least still have some of that look … It's going to feel very much the same, but it will feel probably a little bit more modern."
