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Message: [QUOTE="huskymedic, post: 3963159, member: 549"] One would say they do... [MEDIA=twitter]1389298683758485508[/MEDIA] [URL='https://outline.com/zbspFt'][B]Alternate access reading link here:[/B][/URL] ->“There’s a lot of people saying, ‘Why is it costing so much to build a small arena?’” said Dan Toscano, Board of Trustees chair. “I'm sure there are people out there who would say, ‘Why are they spending all this money?’ … The union situation in New England construction makes it expensive. As a public university we have all sorts of requirements we have to live by. If UConn were a private university, this project would not cost as much. That's a reality of life. It's embedded in all the construction that that state of Connecticut does and, frankly, most states.” <- ->Sacred Heart’s arena capacity will be 4,000. Some wonder why UConn’s isn’t, also. “I promise you, you can walk into a lot of athletic departments and find a lot of plans that have been designed but never been built,” athletic director David Benedict said. “If you design pie in the sky, it never gets done. This is a project where we needed to hit a budget target, which in this case was $70 million, and it's going to be a fantastic facility. We had to design a project where we could get everything that we wanted out of it for the amount of money we could afford. There are a lot of people who want a bigger house, but if you can't afford it, you can't buy it.” <- -> Benedict said UConn consulted most other Hockey East members during the building planning phases. “Nobody told me we should be building something bigger,” Benedict said. “Nobody said, ‘Dave, you're crazy, you have to build something at 4,000 seats.’ Everyone said, ‘Dave, we can't fill our arenas every game.’ We'd much rather have a sold-out arena every game. And most of the people that sit on the side of the desk I’m on would tell you [they would] much rather walk into a facility that is jam-packed and you can't get a ticket than walk into one that's got 1,000 extra seats so you can say, 'Look how big we built this.' It doesn't matter if you can't fill. Filing them once out of 10 games versus filing them every night is different. If you can say this is sold-out every single night, that creates something. And hopefully that is what we'll have.” <- ->“It was probably May [2020] when one of our trustees asked if we should really be going through this construction process in the middle of a pandemic,” Toscano said. “But the translation in construction to waiting is higher cost. If we wait, the cost is going to go up. We had sort of worn out our welcome with Hockey East on getting this thing done, and it may well end up being quite a bit cheaper. … I'm excited to unlock potential and excited to have a home for our hockey programs that reflect who we are as a university and reflect our programming in athletics.” Costs and timelines have, “changed based on going through the public/private [options] and doing it as a university project, and ultimately what we thought we could really build it for and what the university and the [athletic department] thought we could fund,” Benedict said. <- -> “This puts forward our best and most talented people,” Toscano said of athletic facility construction. “I'm totally good with it and I think it's good for the state. If you want to sit down with sharp pencil and calculator and try to figure it out, I think you’re looking at it the wrong way. If you look at public universities around the country and some of the crazy things they have going on in athletics, we run a spartan ship, comparatively. I can stand in front of any legislative committee or governor or staff and talk about how this all makes sense, and I feel really good about it.” <- [/QUOTE]

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