USD Magazine, Spring 1999

Lippold took some time, weighing the campus environment, USD's strong track record and the chance he might be able to play in his first year in a Torero uniform. While he considered the gym, Lippold says he was impressed not only with USD's academics and its campus, but its ability to field championship teams with less than top-flight athletic facilities. "I thought about it for a long time, but in the end, it was the whole package and not just the promise of a new arena or anything like that," says Lippold, a redshirt freshman guard. Today, Holland no longer avoids the subject of the Sports Center with recruits. Rather, he happily walks them through the site plan for a 5,000-seat arena featuring a state-of-the-art fitness and weight center, sports medicine clinic, Torero Hall of Fame and meeting and reception rooms with views to the Pacific Ocean. The $17 .3 million project, funded in part by a $7 mil– lion lead gift from Sid and Jenny Craig, formally breaks ground May 5 and is expected to open by Fall 2000, in time for Lippold's junior year. Yet the Jenny Craig

"Going to the gym for games was not high on our list of things to do when I was in school," says William Scripps '83, who chairs the Jenny Craig Pavilion fund-raising committee. "The pavilion will immediately become a place to congregate and a focus of university life." FROM WORST TO FIRST For that very reason, President Alice B. Hayes pushed the arena to the top of the "to-build list" at USD shortly after arriving at Alcala Park in 1995. Talk of a new facility was nothing new. In 1979, USD athletics moved from smaller Division II to the more competitive Division I, and teams found themselves up against the likes of Stanford, UCLA and USC. By 1988, the need for an on-campus arena was formally addressed by the school's board of trustees and former President Author E. Hughes. "We were working to provide our students with the best possible classrooms, laboratories and academic needs, and it was time to think about completing that picture," says Hughes, who adds the university waited seven years to proceed with the arena plan because available funds were used on academic endeavors.

While construction of the new arena helps com– plete the picture, other USD athletic facilities also are targeted for improvement as part of a long-range master plan over the next 25 years. Torero Stadium, which has room for only 3,000 spectators and is too narrow for NCAA soccer playoff standards, will eventually

Pavilion means much more to USD than a recruiting tool for athletes. The arena will level the playing field in the wee, increasing USD's

profile nationally as the school positions itself to host events including wee and National Collegiate Athletics Association tournaments and student– sponsored concerts. Its completion also is expected to be the first step in imple– menting the remainder of

USD's $40 million master plan to improve other aging athletic facilities, including the university's football and soccer stadium, tennis courts and pool. Perhaps most important, the Jenny Craig Pavilion will complete the "college experience" at Alcala Park not only for student-athletes, who will be able to claim one of the premier facilities in the West, but also by strengthening school spirit and bringing athletics into students' social lives.

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