Gophers have great expectations for Athletes Village facilities project

Scott Ellison, Gophers associate athletic director in charge of the Athletes Village facilities project, is enthusiastically reporting the project is progressing as scheduled. He recently spoke about every aspect of where the $166 million project is at and where it's going.

Q How are the facilities coming along overall?

A The facility project is going along really well. My favorite saying is we're on time and we're on budget. That is factual. We're on time and we're on budget. The football facilities are taking shape as well. The biggest building as part of this is the U indoor football facility, and you could actually fit the old football facility inside the new facility. We have 85 feet to the peak of the indoor facility so we can actually punt indoors; that was one of the problems we had in the old facility was you couldn't punt indoors because we were at 65 feet. That's going to be a huge advantage for us going forward with practices.

Q How far is that building in terms of construction?

A I would say the Center for Excellence, which is the academic and leadership center along with the basketball practice facility, is ahead of the football facility. If I were to put percentages on it I would say the football facility is probably in the 40 percent range, right now. They have a lot of the exterior is starting to get framed up on the football performance center, which is the office complex and the weight room and locker room complex. Then all of the steel skeleton is up for the new indoor facility and they're going to start siding that soon. It's really going to start taking shape in the next month and a half.

Q What makes the facility better than the old facility?

A First of all, we're going to have a weight room that's going to be twice the size of the weight room we have now for football, approximately 7,000 square feet to 16,000 square feet for the weight room. The athletic medicine area will be a much better facility for the football players and for the team. We're going to have two what are called hydro-works treadmills in there, so if there's a player who can't put any weight on an injury it can actually get him into these treadmill pools and they can do non-weightbearing rehab sessions without any issues with their injuries. That's a unique feature to the facility. The offices and the team meeting rooms and position meeting rooms are all on one level now. In our current facility the offices are all on the top floor, the position meeting rooms are on the lower floor so there's a lot of going back and forth between those two floors just for the players to meet with the coaches and now it will all be on the same floor.

Q What about the basketball facility, what does that add to the team?

A Well, what they have right now is the women practice over in Williams Arena and they have four baskets that they can practice on. The men practice in Bierman and they have six baskets they can practice on but it's only on one court. So really if the team is practicing no one else can put up shots or get on the court, and those situations are for the men and the women. With the new facility, both men and women will have basketball courts and we have a main practice court with two cross-courts and the beauty of those two cross-courts is that the three-point arc is not on one side of that cross-court is not on the main practice court. So if the team is practicing and there's a player that needs to put up shots they can go over there and put up shots without interrupting practice. In addition we have eight baskets total in each gym, so that's a huge improvement over what we have now.

Q Will the old indoor facility for football still be used?

A It's very heavily used, in the wintertime we have teams in there from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday night. Football moving into their own facility is going to help that. … The long-range plan for our facilities is to eventually improve that facility as well. It's not going to happen right away. Money is tight, but our long-range goal is to be able to not only improve the indoor facility but reuse the old Gibson-Nagurski building for different units in sports to move into. Then we're going to use areas that are being vacated in Bierman for other teams and different things within the athletic department, as well.

Q Does this facility compare to other Big Ten facilities?

A Oh yeah, our facilities will be on par if not better than other Big Ten insitutions. The crown jewel for us is the Land O'Lakes Leadership Center, that is where we can really sell ourselves over other schools, because we have the Fortune 500 companies in town here, not many other Big Ten schools have that at their disposal. We can bring these kids in as a freshman and we have a nutrition center on the bottom floor, academics in the middle floor, leadership development on the top. We can bring them in and make them stronger, better, faster down on the nutrition center, take care of their academics and move them towards graduation in the academic center, and then on the top floor we can take them from the backpack to the briefcase experience where they're coming in and maybe going up for their meeting with Fortune 500 companies. They're practicing interviews, actually interviewing with companies up there, learning life skills, all of those different things that we can do here with our new center that other schools can't do. And we have the connections downtown, that's what's really important.

JOTTINGS

• Timberwolves General Manager Scott Layden knows the team will have a very good first-round pick. He was asked how the team scouts the wide variety of international players available. "It's a process," he said. "We go through it day-to-day; actually we have scouts right now overseas looking at potential draft picks. But also, and I think this is something we need to remember, we're also looking at players that could come over as free agents. I think there's a lot of good players that are playing internationally that have a lot of Euro game experience that we could use on our team. So we're looking at potential draft players but also players that could help us with experience."

• There seem to be two primary candidates to be the Gophers' starting quarterback in Connor Rhoda and Demry Croft, but coach P.J. Fleck said he might wait until the last minute to name a starter. "I'll definitely name a starter before the first game, I know that. I don't think we'll have a person that we name before training camp," Fleck said. "I think the job will be won during training camp at some point. But I am one of those people that it will go up until it's necessary to name one. I like my starter to be able to have a lot of reps prior to the first game, too. It won't be the day before the game unless it has to. You like to make a decision a few weeks into training camp, so those last two weeks they're getting the majority of the reps."

• Chaska High School product Brad Hand, who was a second-round pick by the Marlins in 2008, has turned his career around since being claimed off waivers by the Padres in April 2016. Entering Saturday, the 27-year-old lefthanded reliever had a 2.65 ERA over 105⅓ innings with 129 strikeouts since joining San Diego. Last season, he led major league pitchers in appearances with 82. In the five seasons with the Marlins, Hand struggled with a 4.71 ERA over 288⅔ innings and averaged just 5.9 strikeouts per nine innings, compared to 11.0 with the Padres.

Sid Hartman can be heard Monday and Friday on WCCO AM-830 at 8:40 a.m. and Sundays at 9:30 a.m. E-mail: shartman@startribune.com