Making the upgrade
Coaches thrilled by changes to facilities
Rusty Wright has measured the distance from his team’s on-campus locker room to where the players have to shower.
“100 yards,” the veteran coach said.
Same length as a football field.
It’s been a problem for a long time, too. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football players — usually wrapped in towels — have been tasked with the long walk, which takes them past an athletic department office where news conferences routinely take place.
An updated facility for UTC athletics has been the talk of the university for quite some time now, certainly for years and maybe even decades. With nothing to show for so long, though, it’s no surprise some responded with skepticism, a feeling of “seeing is believing.”
When Mark Wharton accepted the job as UTC’s athletic director in 2017, the former Penn State associate AD for development did so with some belief the university would break ground on the new facility soon after that. There was already an artist’s rendering of how it was going to look, but there would be a lot of twists and turns and roadblocks along the way, none bigger than the arrival of the
COVID-19 pandemic
in 2020, which raised costs and led to additional fundraising.
It’s been a long, long road to get to this point, but Wharton came to UTC with a reputation for success when it came to raising money and has lived up to that billing. UTC finally broke ground on the project in March 2022 and has made enough progress to believe
the Wolford Family Athletics Complex will be completed this year.
UTC teams are already using some of the new or revamped aspects of the athletic facilities attached to McKenzie Arena, which hosts basketball games. Although the football Mocs’
home games are played off campus at Finley Stadium, the team generally practices at Scrappy Moore Field, which is close to McKenzie.
“It’s going to change their daily life,” said Wright, a former UTC football player who had two stints as a Mocs assistant before returning to his alma mater as head coach in December 2018. “It’s going to change ours, too, because we’re going to be around.
“They don’t know how much it’s going to impact them right now, but sometimes you have to remember what you came from, too, and how hard things were at one point in time. Nice stuff is great and all that, but at the end of the day you’ve got to go to work, and you have to go figure out a way to get things done.”
‘HUGE IMPRESSION’
Suddenly, that 100-yard walk to the showers won’t be nearly as long (nor will it be as revealing). Football coaches will have more access to the players, who no longer have to go from the first floor, where the locker room has been, to the fourth floor, where the coaches’ offices are located. The same is true with the basketball programs, which will benefit from brandnew locker rooms and closer proximities.
The sports medicine area, which was one of the first parts of the complex to become available, has a “hydrotherapy pool and treatment rooms with a newly dedicated events space for hospitality not only for athletics but campus-wide use,” a UTC release noted.
Men’s basketball coach Dan Earl, who is in his second season at UTC after previously leading fellow Southern Conference school Virginia Military Institute, pointed out recruiting has been where his program has seen some of the benefits of what is about to come.
“You no longer have to show them pictures of what it’s going to look like, but now you can walk them through there, so that helps as well,” Earl said. “Then the new atrium and walkway coming in and all the offices, it just makes such a huge impression upon the recruits.”
Women’s basketball coach Shawn Poppie said the new facility makes UTC “a true mid-major” school. Poppie was a Virginia Tech assistant before taking over at UTC ahead of the 2022-23 season, which was capped by a SoCon tournament title and the program’s first NCAA tournament appearance since 2017. Poppie’s 2023-24 Mocs won the SoCon regular-season title, securing the No. 1 seed for the league tourney that tips off Thursday in Asheville, North Carolina.
“It says that we can compete with anybody, in my opinion,” Poppie said of the renovations and additions. “It also speaks to the importance of athletics and specifically women’s basketball from Mark Wharton, our whole administration, which is an exciting thing because I think we’re building something special here, and we’ve got all the resources here that we can continue to make it special.”
A year after Wharton took over, the AD and other UTC administrators worked with the Populus Group on a master plan that included renovations to McKenzie Arena as well as nearby Maclellan Gymnasium, the former home to the basketball team that hosts matches for the volleyball and wrestling teams. The results have been impressive improvements to athletic facilities all over campus.
Maclellan is a lot brighter now, while massive upgrades have been made at the Brenda Lawson Student-Athlete Success Center, which houses the Chattem Basketball Practice Facility, the Wolford Family Strength and Conditioning Center, and since May 2023, the Food City Fueling Station that provides food to athletes.
Still, the completion of the Wolford Family Athletics Complex will be the biggest step yet.
STAYING HUNGRY
As happy as UTC’s coaches are, Wright — who recently received a contract extension after leading the Mocs to their first appearance in the Football Championship Subdivision playoffs since 2016 — warned against any feelings of complacency from the new players benefiting from the efforts of those before them.
“We’ll figure something out, I promise you that,” Wright said of emphasizing that message to his team. “We’re going to have an opportunity, especially in this day and age when rosters change so much, to be around each other more, which is going to help a football team out at the end of the day. That has me more excited than new showers, new meeting rooms.
“Again, I’m grateful, thankful for it, excited for it, but us having an opportunity to walk out of an office and go down to academics and see them or walk down a flight of stairs and go into a locker room and find them, or just walking out of that building onto whatever street that is out there when going to class, but they have to walk by our offices, they have to come right by us to do those things and once they leave those things. That’s going to be huge for us. That’s something that people just don’t understand how important that is.”
It’s been a long road from past to present for UTC’s athletic facilities, but future Mocs will have to be told that story.
“What we have to protect against is in seven, eight months, they’re only going to know that,” Wharton said of the new facilities. “They’re not going to know walking in the halls, and part of me being the redneck from North Carolina wants to find a piece that we can remind those guys that it wasn’t always like this. It’s like culture: How do you keep that, the edge and the chip? So Rusty will figure that out.
“But I’m excited, not only what it’s going to do for his program, but we’ve talked about with the athletic training area, the men’s and women’s basketball locker rooms, the meeting rooms, all that impacting every one of our student-athletes and every aspect.
“What we did with the weight room last summer, redoing all that and our nutrition station, to see where we were in 2017 to where we are now — you talked about the people, the loyalty that we have here, I’m excited about the future, it’s just making sure that we continue to appreciate where we were.”