Editor-in-Chief
After a big year for CSU Bakersfield athletics, Athletic Director Kenneth Siegfried has some big plans to add to the athletic facilities this year.
Some of the projects that Siegfried and Facility Enhancement Karen Langston are working on are the turtle batting cage for baseball (about $12,000), hitting tunnels (about $5,000 to $10,000), netting for the foul balls (still unsure about the price), update seats for the Icardo Center ($250,000) and they are hoping for lights at the softball field in the next couple years.
They are currently putting in place the new backstop and safety pads ($120,000) for the Roadrunner Softball Complex, which was started on Oct. 19.
“It would feel amazing [to get all of these things accomplished], and I know how important it is for the next step in our athletic department,” Siegfried said. “To be able to do some of those projects, especially the ones like the strength and conditioning, locker room and sports medicine that impact all of our student athletes, that’s what they deserve. It’s right up there with my top goals.”
Siegfried said that the biggest short-term project is the Kegley Center.
“Because all of this takes private dollars, the way this works is we build the plan, get the money and implement it,” he said. “In this case we were able to get the money, so we got $870,000 grant from the NCAA, which was huge for us.”
He said that the Kegley Center will house all of their academics and two-thirds of the NCAA grant, which they received on July of 2015, will go to the center.
“The rest will go into programming, adding some additional advisers, adding some tutors and bumping some people up from part-time to full-time,” said Siegfried.
Langston said that at the moment, they are in the facility next to the children center and it’s about 1,500 square feet.
“We are going to try and make space for that somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 feet,” said Langston.
Langston and Siegfried added that they would like to make a new strength and conditioning facility. They said that they considered making a new facility.
However, it would be quite expensive and remodeling the existing one would be difficult as well, due to the limited space.
According to Langston, it would cost around $80,000.
“As we continue to secure the funding, you’ll continue to see more stuff around spirit, while the focus will be around [academics and strength and conditioning] for our student athletes, you will also see stuff with spirit too,” Siegfried said. “We want students as a whole when they come on campus to see that this is a place that they can have a great time, while earning a very strong education and degree.”
Siegfried added that they will do banners and give out rings to the volleyball team and the baseball team winning the Western Athletic Conference Tournaments.
The rings will cost $300 a piece, and the banners will be about $400 to $500 a piece. It’ll be about $9,000 for every player to get a championship ring. They are also going to have banners for all the other teams. They are still unsure about the date when they will present the teams with the banners.
