UW considering removing track from Husky Stadium

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/huskies/3 ... ler22.html

Turner's legacy tied to stadium
By TED MILLER
P-I COLUMNIST

Husky Stadium hasn't conjured many magical moments for Todd Turner since he took over as Washington's athletic director in June 2004. Five victories, to be exact, and just one against a Pac-10 Conference foe.

Moreover, the stadium, one of the most scenic and celebrated in the country, has provided little solace when Turner looks away from the field in frustration. He's heard about rowdy crowds draped head-to-toe in purple, but he's mostly felt silent taunts from a steadily increasing number of empty seats.

The final game before he arrived -- the 2003 Apple Cup -- attracted 74,549 fans, and attendance exceeded 70,000 for every home game even during that tumultuous season following Rick Neuheisel's demise. Last year, Husky Stadium's average attendance was 57,483, and the final home game -- a humiliating 20-3 loss to winless Stanford -- was witnessed by only 55,896, with few lingering until the final whistle.

So it might seem bold -- or, perhaps, foolhardy -- that Turner isn't shying away from intertwining his legacy at Washington with a stadium that has been declining in roughly the same fashion as the team it houses.

Turner shortly will convene an ad hoc committee that will study and then present a plan to the UW regents for the future of Husky Stadium before the end of the school year.

That committee will recommend one of two proposals: 1) a significant stadium renovation along with a strategy for funding the project, which could cost "multiple hundreds of millions of dollars," according to Turner; 2) a far less ambitious plan to repair critical cosmetic and infrastructure problems.

Option No. 2, by the way, won't come cheap. Turner estimates it could cost $70 million over the next decade, and it wouldn't include many crowd-pleasing improvements.

Chief among potential "crowd-pleasing improvements" from option No. 1 is a removal of the track that surrounds the field. That would be a massive undertaking requiring a complete reconstruction of the west end zone stands and, probably, a lowering of the field.

Removing the track, by the way, would make Husky Stadium one of the best five college football venues in the country.



Naturally, there's a catch, the most obvious being Turner isn't sure how he's going to pay for the project, which will involve complicated environmental and logistical concerns, ranging from issues with the water table to reasonable questions about how it might affect the resurgent UW track program.
"We don't have plans; we have possibilities," Turner said. "There's a difference. There are no easy answers to your questions. We have to get some sense of what is realistic.

"There are things that need to be done just to keep (the stadium) working. The longer we defer major renovation, the more we're going to spend on maintenance, which is something we'd like to avoid or minimize."

Removing the track has been discussed for years. Turner, however, appears to be done with talking. He has decided to push the renovation because he believes it should run concurrent to the 520 bridge and Sound Transit construction projects that are scheduled to begin in late 2008 or early 2009 just outside the southwest corner of the stadium parking lot. That construction is scheduled to be completed in 2014, so Turner's window of opportunity is limited.

Also limited are his prospects of getting boosters, not so far removed from shelling out for the $90 million "Campaign for the StudentAthlete," to ante up once again.

Many fans already are chafed at Turner for raising football ticket prices. His case also can't be helped by his marquee coaching hire, Tyrone Willingham, entering his third season with few projecting the Huskies will fight their way out of the bottom half of the Pac-10.

There is another source of potential funding.

Hey, anybody want to discuss public funds for another sports facility? Turner implied that might be his only recourse. The stadium committee will have to consider its feasibility.

"I don't know how realistic that is," he said. "I see how tight the dollars are that are allocated to sports projects. It makes me pretty wary that I can expect to share in that. But I think that's important to keep on the table. I think the needs of Husky football are in line with the needs of the sports community and the sports industry in our state.

"Husky Stadium is an iconic structure in the Northwest, part of our culture here."

When USC comes to town on Sept. 29, Turner's first major football project, the new Legends Center, is scheduled to open. That afternoon, the Huskies will don retro uniforms honoring the team that beat top-ranked Minnesota in the 1961 Rose Bowl.

Turner is hoping to whip up nostalgia for a storied past while pushing into the future.

A once-profitable, self-supporting athletic department awash in football money is struggling to stay in the black, but that isn't stopping Turner from pursuing a monumental project that he believes is a cornerstone for the Huskies rejoining the nation's elite.

If he pushes it through, and Willingham leads a football renaissance, Turner will secure a glittering legacy, one that would earn him a place in his Legends Center.

If not, empty seats might not be the only things taunting him.