MISSOULA — When the University of Montana breaks ground on its latest project to improve facilities at the Adams Center, it will add to a total of recent investments that already tops an estimated $25 million.
The major facilities upgrade, which will renovate the locker room and other facilities for Grizzlies' basketball, was announced last week.
It comes on the heels of a flurry of investments and upgrades to the UM Athletic Complex in recent years. Chief among those projects was the construction of the $14 million Washington-Grizzly Champions Center.
Athletic Director Kent Haslem says the investment also includes many other smaller projects which have provided a huge economic impact over the past several years.
"When you add in new turf in the football stadium, a new softball complex, scoreboards in both Washington-Grizzly Stadium and in Dahlberg Arena, I think we're at roughly $25 million worth of investments that we've made,” Haslam said.
“Everything from the Academic Center, to new tennis courts, to resurfacing a track that has come from sources, private sources, or us generating the revenue to do or partnerships like through Learfield," he added.
The Montana men's basketball team will receive a renovated locker room plus an expanded space that will feature a players' lounge, coaches' locker room and a team meeting room. The upgrades come on the heels of back-to-back Big Sky Conference regular-season and tournament championships for the men's basketball team.
"It’s probably been about a year since we started to tackle it head on. It’s always been there but certainly the success of basketball has helped that. After you do a really large project like the Champions Center you get a little bit of donor fatigue," Haslam told MTN News.
"We didn’t leave any rock unturned to get that champions center built and so you kind of got to give people a little bit of time off. And let them process through those champion center commitments they made."
The target date for these renovations is before the 2020-21 season and is phase two of UM's master plan in athletics after the Champions Center.
