*Disclaimer: This article is from an April Fool’s issue*
Move over, Jerry Jones. Guilford is now king when it comes to athletic venues.
With the recent passage of the Athletic Expansion Initiative, our humble athletic confines will be the premier athletic facilities in the nation.
In order to make space for the new complex, nearly 100 acres of forest will need to be torn down. Where the Guilford Farm stands now, there will be a new state of the art concession court – including a nacho bar complete with 17 different types of cheese.
Athletic Director Tom Palombo hopes to create a new precedent when it comes to college athletic facilities.
“We wanted to be the best of the best when it comes to athletics. Our new facilities will make us the envy of the athletic community,” Palombo said.
The most innovative flair yet, is that the newly designed facilities will create new homes for every sports team on campus. In addition to a brand new football stadium, complete with a jumbotron that outshines the megatron at Cowboy Stadium, there will be individual women’s and men’s lacrosse fields, soccer fields and the new Chabotar Indoor Stadium which will host the men’s and women’s basketball teams.
The new facilities will cost the school around $450 million or about the same cost as going to the moon four times.
The entire bill will be footed by donors and student’s tuition fees.
In order to cover the predominant amount of the costs, student’s tuition will nearly double.
President Kent Chabotar looks past the cost and sees what the new facilities mean to the school.
“Sure they may be expensive, but these new facilities are going to make us the the most elite athletic school in the nation,” Chabotar said. “No longer will we have to compete with UNC, Duke or NC State when it comes to getting recruits. They will want the opportunity to play on my court.”
The pride and joy of the new facilities will be the football stadium.
The new home for the Quaker football team will come complete with locker rooms with rich mahogany flooring, individual lockers that include 22” HD tv’s for film review. Each locker also gets its own built in iPad for scouting reports. The new playing surface features a composite material designed by NASA that has not been released to the general public yet.
The new surface is akin to current turf fields, but when a player falls or gets tackled, the surface immediately turns into a pillow-like surface that comforts the player as they go down.
Sophomore lacrosse-player Trey Atkinson was one of the student test-subjects for the field.
“It was unreal,” Atkinson said. “No longer do I have to worry about turf-burn. The chance for injury is greatly reduced.”
The new facilities should be ready by the 2014 school year. The inaugural event on the football field will be the highly anticipated matchup between the Quakers and the Alabama Crimson Tide.
The game will be the first time a division three school is pitted against a division one school.
“I wouldn’t have scheduled it, had I not believed we could win the game,” Palombo said. “Our athletic facilities will provide us with the biggest opportunity when we take on the defending national champions.”
Indeed buzz about Guilford athletics is at an all-time high. If interested in donating to the facilities fund, send orders to [email protected] please.
