Syracuse football indoor practice facility, steel

Steel goes up near Manley Field House for construction of the new Syracuse football indoor practice facility.

(David Lassman | dlassman@syracuse.com)

Syracuse, N.Y. — It's all there. The lifts and the cranes. The trucks and the excavators. The steel and concrete. It's all there, on the south side of the Manley Field House Complex where Syracuse University's outdoor track used to be.

This artist's rendering of the new Syracuse University indoor practice facility, scheduled to open on Dec. 1, promises to be "absolutely gorgeous," according to Pete Sala, SU's senior associate athletics director for facilities.

And in some 3½ months, it'll all become something else.

"In my mind, this is a Taj Majal," said Pete Sala, SU's senior associate athletics director for facilities. "It's going to be an absolutely beautiful, beautiful facility."

He was talking this morning about the new Orange football indoor practice compound — a state-of-the-art building featuring 87,000 square feet of FieldTurf that:

Will cost tens of millions of dollars before the first blocking sled is hit,

Is scheduled to open on Dec. 1, or in plenty of time to allow Scott Shafer's club to practice for what would be the program's fourth bowl in five years, and

Should, and this is important, wow Syracuse recruits for a good long while.

"You guys know," Sala said to a group of media types who'd gathered to watch the first of the structure's 30 steel column beams get erected. "You travel around with the football team. This is commonplace now to have an indoor practice facility."

It is, indeed, an arms race out there in the world of big-time college sports, and the Orange remains all in with this new edifice that has a footprint the size of the Carrier Dome and will stand some 40 feet in height at the corners and some 70 feet in height at the center.

Sala declared that it will not only dazzle Shafer, the SU coach, and his players, but regular folks, too.

"This building, on the outside, is going to mimic Carmelo," he said in reference to the nearby Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Center, the $19-million complex that opened in 2009. "It'll have that white block, that white wall. There will be a very large block 'S' on the front of the building that'll be orange and lit up at night.

"There is going to be a Plaza 44 out front that'll have three statues of some people I think you'll be able to figure out being called 'Plaza 44' (i.e., Jim Brown, Ernie Davis and Floyd Little). It'll be absolutely gorgeous when you come around that corner on Colvin Street. Absolutely gorgeous."

To get there, to get to that architectural wonder and to do so on time, some 60 workers — who, according to project superintendent Tim Kelley of the Hayner Hoyt Corporation, may be joined by as many as 30 others before the project is finished — are laboring 12-hour shifts six days a week.

"Now," Kelley said, "all we need is some good weather."

The more of that, the sooner this Taj Mahal will rise.

Syracuse football indoor practice facility 14 Gallery: Syracuse football indoor practice facility

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(Bud Poliquin's columns/commentaries and other contributions — such as this news report — can be found a couple of times a day, usually, Monday through Friday, usually, on syracuse.com. His work also regularly appears on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. Additionally, Poliquin can be heard weekday mornings between 10-12 on the "Bud & the Manchild" sports-talk radio show on The Score-1260.)