Construction on new Auburn arena to begin Monday

In four days, Auburn’s new basketball arena will be a reality.

It won’t be finished — that won’t happen until July of 2010 at the earliest — but it will finally begin .

Construction crews will begin groundbreaking for the project on Monday, concluding almost three years of planning and anticipation. The project won’t be much to look at for a while: The first few weeks of construction will involve digging holes for the foundation.

“We’ll be going down instead of up,” said Randy Byars, AU’s director of athletics facility planning.

With energy costs and environmental concerns rising, energy efficiency was a priority for the new building. The arena will feature computer-controlled lighting systems that should minimize power bills, as well as other energy-efficient features.

But the new arena’s biggest bonus when it comes to efficiency is simple: It isn’t Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum. The 40-year-old coliseum, Auburn’s current basketball home, is hardly green.

“Beard-Eaves is anti-efficiency,” Byars joked. “It was built at a time when nobody cared about that. But the new facility can be amazingly efficient.”

Auburn’s contract with Harbert International, the construction firm that will handle the project, calls for 720 days of construction. If that schedule holds, the building will open July 4, 2010.

A formal groundbreaking ceremony is expected to take place in August, likely around the time of the AU Board of Trustees’ meeting, scheduled for Aug. 28-29.

The arena, currently slated to seat around 9,600 fans, will be built near the intersection of Wire Road and Roosevelt Drive, northwest of Beard-Eaves and next to the university’s new dorms, which are slated to open in August 2009.

The new arena will host the men’s and women’s basketball teams for games, practices, weight-lifting sessions and meetings. It will also include the university’s ticket office, the athletic department’s Lovelace Museum, a retail store for AU-branded merchandise and more.

The arena isn’t the only construction that affects Auburn’s athletic department. AU just concluded $5 million worth of renovations to its main athletic building. The building houses the football teams’ locker rooms and offices, as well as many administrators, including athletic director Jay Jacobs.

The renovations include a new-look football locker room — complete with big-screen TV in the players’ lounge, plus an expanded hydrotherapy room and renovated offices for AU’s football coaches.

“You can’t take facilities for granted,” Jacobs said.

The hydrotherapy room includes four pools with varying temperatures as well as an underwater treadmill. It replaces a facility that featured just two pools and no treadmill.

“We’ve looked at a lot of facilities and I haven’t seen one than is better than ours,” Byars said.

cmickle@oanow.com | 737-2561