Nevada athletics broke ground on its $12 million Eric and Linda Lannes Basketball Building last Friday, which will provide the Wolf Pack men’s and women’s basketball teams with locker rooms and a players lounge.
It’s one of the most expensive facility projects in school history and included a record-setting $4 million gift from the Lannes family. That got us thinking about the top-five facility “must haves” as the Wolf Pack continues to improve its infrastructure. Below is a list of our facilities Nevada needs to add, which we discussed on last week’s NSN Daily. You can watch that full segment below or watch our report on the Lannes building groundbreaking below that.
5. Track and field facility: Nevada’s track at Mackay Stadium has been resurfaced a couple of times in the last decade, but the Wolf Pack needs a legitimate track that doesn’t go under bleachers with a potential location on the old Manogue property, where track and field has some field practice areas.
4. Peccole Park renovation: The Wolf Pack got a new playing surface at Don Weir Field in 2018, but there’s a need for a massive renovation that would create a new locker room, indoor batting cages and coaches offices down the third-base line.
3. Indoor tennis courts: The city of Reno doesn’t have indoor tennis courts, which makes winter practice all but impossible. Nevada did construct six on-campus outdoor tennis courts in 2016, the McArthur Tennis Center.
2. Soccer-only facility: Nevada soccer plays at Mackay Stadium, which is less than ideal. In a perfect world, it’d have its own facility with a grass pitch. Perhaps the Wolf Pack can partner with Battle Born FC’s push for a stadium in north Reno.
1. Indoor football practice facility: This proposed facility has had several iterations over the last two decades. The recent publicly pushed model would be a $40 million-plus facility that would include all sports. The behind-the scenes push, however, has been for a roughly $10 million football-first facility that would be scaled down but more realistic. Montana is in the middle of constructing a similar building at a cost of $10.2 million. Nevada’s project would be similar and could be the first phase of a larger indoor facility that would house all sports, although an indoor facility, even if it was football first, could still serve most sports on campus. With wildfire smoke becoming a staple of Northern Nevada’s summers and falls, getting something built as quickly as possible is more of a “need” than a “want.” Given the scaled-down version of a potential facility, the Wolf Pack has increased optimism this project could actually be completed relatively soon (although I’ve written that before).