Kentucky set to approve upgrades to Nutter Field House, new track facility

Kentucky Athletics is making moves. Pending board approval, Wildcats facilities are getting an upgrade.

UK plans to build a dedicated track and field facility, renovate Nutter Field House and add new video boards at Kroger Field. All told, the project will cost $30 million.

“These are steps in our program we always desire to take, and we’ve got lots of things still that we want to get done in other areas as well,” Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart said, via the Lexington Herald Leader’s Josh Moore. “But this is something that’s a really important step for a lot of our programs. In total, these projects affect roughly 60 to 65 percent of all our student-athletes. So it has a dramatic effect on the different things that we do and the health and welfare of our young people.”

More on the Kentucky athletics renovations

Nutter Field House was built in 1992 and is home of the football team and track and field teams. With the track team now getting its own facility, Kentucky plans to make it a football-focused facility, notably with new turf and different lighting.

Coach Mark Stoops, who recently signed an extension to stay at Kentucky, previously called for a new football facility.

“We need a 100-yard field,” UK coach Mark Stoops said in December, via the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Jon Hale. “You can tell where we’re located geographically that we need the indoor because of the weather. … We just need the room. It gets condensed, it gets dangerous. You need to practice.

“I’m not asking for something that we don’t need.”

As for the track team, its new facility will go near the former baseball stadium. It will feature a hydraulic track, which can be raised or lowered and is the same material the NCAA uses for its championships. In fact, Kentucky will be one of four schools to have such a resource, along with Arkansas, South Carolina and Texas A&M. That new building will cost about $20 million.

Finally, a new scoreboard setup is also in the works. Kentucky is proposing $5 million to install either a single board in one of the end zones or two boards to replace the current boards, which are more than 10 years old.

“We’re excited to see what people come back to us with,” Barnhart said. “We’ve put a new scoreboard up in Memorial Coliseum. We’ve put two new scoreboards up in softball and soccer, and those have turned out remarkably well. They are like watching high-def television in a stadium. I mean, it is a really clear, great picture.”