When Robert Giovannetti returned to Lubbock from an out-of-town trip last week, he noticed the roped-off Double-T had been removed from the grassy spot at the north end of Jones AT&T Stadium. The Texas Tech senior associate athletic director knew that was coming, but not last week.

It made him sentimental.

"When I was a kid growing up, my parents would drop me off in that grass area," Giovannetti said, "so I spent every game in that grass area (around the Double-T). So I would like to have some of that if I could, but I don't know where it is."

The Double-T was sacrificed to the ongoing north-end renovation - complete with new stadium club and loge boxes - that will give the stadium a new look for the 2016 season.

Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt said in February that plans called for the loge boxes to extend down off the stadium club to within about 3 feet of the Double-T emblem. More depth was needed than he anticipated.

"You see where it came down?" Giovannetti said, pointing to concrete at the top of the grassy area. "(The area for the loge boxes) infringed on top of it, so they had no choice but to take it out, for space purposes."

The grassy area will be replaced by artificial turf with a smaller, inlaid Double-T emblem. The one just removed, a scarlet Double-T on a white background, was a Jones Stadium feature for decades.

"I would've loved to have seen if we could have kept it somehow, some way," Giovannetti said. "But they said it was just so old, it just couldn't be relocated. It had to either stay or come out.

"But it needed work anyway. I looked at it a couple of weeks ago, and it was in some disrepair, too."

The Tech Board of Regents in December approved a proposal for 56 loge boxes, each with four seats and a television screen. The building that housed the Lettermen's Lounge and ticket office for nearly four decades also was gutted to be repurposed as a game-day stadium club.

Giovannetti said the project is proceeding on time to be ready for the season, which starts with Tech's Sept. 3 home game against Stephen F. Austin.

Meanwhile, across from the south end of the stadium, work continues on Tech's privately funded, $48 million Sports Performance Center, a facility for the football and track and field teams. Mike Ryan, Tech associate AD for facilities and event management, said that project should be substantially complete about a year from now and available for football use in August 2017. That's provided there aren't weather delays.

The Sports Performance Center is being constructed on the site of the former Athletic Training Center.

"The big thing (now) is filling in the hole left behind for the Athletic Training Center and trying to get the foundation level," Ryan said. "That's still ongoing the majority of the past three months."

Workers are drilling support piers around the perimeter of the project, and Ryan said above-ground construction should start sometime in September.

Tech's current Football Training Facility will be incorporated into the Sports Performance Center with the existing football coaches' offices, sports medicine room, team and meeting rooms and weight rooms unchanged. The whole complex will be named for prominent Tech alumnus Ed Whitacre Jr., the former chairman of the Tech Board of Regents, CEO of General Motors and chairman emeritus of AT&T.

The football portion of the Sports Performance Center will be 65 feet tall, the track and field portion 35 feet tall - the standard required as clearance for pole vaulters.

Another offseason project is on tap at the United Supermarkets Arena: a $2.5 million video and audio system. Installation is scheduled to start in mid-August and be complete by Oct. 1.

Included are a new scoreboard, video board, sound system and boards in the four corners of the arena.

don.williams@lubbockonline.com • 766-8734

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