Tom Herman details status of facilities upgrades

Nearly a month ago, we touched on Tom Herman’s three-point plan to upgrade various football facilities and renovate the Moncrief-Neuhaus athletic complex.

As we’ve come to learn early on, and as those who followed Herman’s tenure at Houston are well aware of, the first-year ‘Horns head coach is a man of action. A handful of weeks since the news of his detailed three-point plan to once again keep up with college football’s Joneses, where do things stand with the facilities upgrades?

“I’ve been asking Fernando [Lovo] that for a while,” Herman said during last week’s press conference.

While there’s no answer set in stone, at least yet, Herman said there has been progress, even if just in meeting rooms.

“Yeah, the Moncrief — I know they’re meeting once, if not more, a week,” Herman said. “I think the locker room obviously is the biggest part of that piece with the locker room, the graphics and wall design, the weight room and the training room. But part of the locker room is actually building 120 lockers, and so we’re not going to just start ripping lockers out if we don’t have lockers to replace them. So I think that’ll start happening in a few weeks to be honest with you, and the wall graphics certainly within the next few weeks, and the weight room, I think, and training room will probably be a summertime project.”

As previously noted, $10 million has been allocated to upgrades the football facilities around campus and per Herman, the locker room is the priority at this point because, well, players will spend plenty of time there. Thus, the largest portion of the funds – $3,000,000 – will be spent on building entirely new lockers and upgrading the locker room as a whole.

The wall graphics Herman mentioned, which could be getting underway any day now, are expected to consume approximately $2,000,000 of the funds, while the summertime weight room and training room projects are set to receive $1,500,000 and $1,000,000 in upgrades, respectively.

There’s no telling when each and every one of these projects will be finalized and functional, but considering they’ll not only boost player moral and are essentially a necessity for a program with the brand Texas boasts, the upgrades will serve as a substantial recruiting boost for the key 2018 class.

Bearing in mind how proactive Herman has been in virtually every aspect of upgrading the program since taking over, it shouldn’t be much longer before these updates come with tangible progress.