If you love piles of dirt, holes in the ground, and construction equipment, you’ll probably enjoy this.

If you can’t wait for Rutgers to have a first class indoor training facility for basketball, wrestling, and gymnastics, you’ll be clawing at the screen.

As promised, On the Banks will be following the construction of the RWJBarnabas Health Performance Center going up next to the RAC. For those of you not living in the area, we hope this will whet your appetite and keep you excited about the project. And maybe to encourage you to donate. To paraphrase our Dave White’s post-game basketball posts, we hope this will help you “enjoy the build”.

Back in December, there wasn’t much to see. The RAC still looked like the RAC (and it will for a long while) but there was something different: construction fencing and, in the far background, construction trailers.

It was a time of preliminary work: staking out areas, early grading. But it showed the start of what was to come.

And looking closer, you see the early work and the delivery of some drainage piping.

Preliminary work isn’t very exciting or glamorous. Dirt and machines, puddles and trailers. But in just over a month, it showed progress and a definite look of what was to come.

And here we are in mid-January. What’s changed?

Whoo hoo!!

To paraphrase a former, and not so beloved, athletic director, we have cranes in the air!! Okay, one crane. And holes in the ground and poured concrete.

Cranes and graders and trucks....and mounds of dirt. Golly, where did the dirt come from, Bob? Ah, wait, my friends.

Move a little farther down Hospital Road and you get a pretty good sense of the scope of the work as seen from across the street. That is the Rutgers Business School building in the background.

But what’s going on inside the fence, Bob? Here ya go!

Yes, a hole in the ground - that’s where the dirt came from - and....are those workers? Yes, they are. Good eyes!

There is foundation work going on. The area seems farther away from the Business School which leads me to believe - guessing here - that what we’re seeing here is the parking facility.

Okay, that’s it for now. It is underway and June 2019 will be here before you knows it. And we’ll be back with updates.

Stay thirsty, my friends!

NEW

In response to a question in the comments below, I’m adding side by side renderings of the facility.