Davidson College’s new basketball and volleyball practice facility addresses the needs of a third constituency on campus — the school’s dance programs.
The Harry L. Vance Athletic Center, a $13.3 million project that opened in mid-November, is attached to Belk Arena, where the Atlantic 10 Conference school plays its home games, and provides a new entrance to the arena closer to the parking area. Davidson is situated about 30 minutes north of uptown Charlotte.
In addition to the practice, training and office spaces tied to men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball, there are two dance studios on the second floor of the 50,000-square-foot addition. It’s part of the Cheryle Williamson Center for Dance, named for the woman who donated money to the project on behalf of the 150 students participating in multiple dance groups. Williamson’s husband, Joel, played basketball at Davidson in the 1960s.
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Backlit columns at the Vance Center recognize greats like Stephen Curry.
Photo by: DON MURET / STAFF
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The setup is not your typical blueprint for an NCAA Division I basketball program. “Dance and basketball is kind of an odd combination,” said
Mike Woollen, a sports designer who worked on the project and a managing principal at
Odell, a Charlotte architecture firm.
At a small school with 1,800 students, though, it made sense to fit dance facilities into the building, said Scott Applegate, Davidson’s associate director of athletics in charge of the project. The school introduced a dance minor about two years ago. A dance team performs during men’s basketball games. Separately, the Gamut Dance Company is a student-run organization whose mission is to train dancers with an eye on turning professional and promote awareness of dance as a performing art.
“It’s the single largest group on campus when you [add] all of them together, and they didn’t really have a place to practice and teach,” Applegate said.
Technology plays a part throughout the new addition, where the dance studios are equipped with wireless Internet and Blu-ray capabilities. The basketball practice court on the west side of the ground floor has a television monitor embedded into a sideline wall and hooked up to Apple TV, where coaches can show video that they’ve just recorded on their iPhones and iPads. It’s a nice feature to have compared with breaking down video after the practice session, Applegate said.
Just inside the Vance Center entrance, backlit columns recognize former Davidson athletes such as Stephen Curry, the NBA’s reigning MVP with the Golden State Warriors, as well as current coach Bob McKillop and the retired Lefty Driesell, who coached at Davidson from 1960 to ’69. Visitors encounter Davidson’s new hall of fame, designed by Jack Porter, a Greenville, S.C., firm specializing in branded spaces at college venues. A large touch-screen display takes fans through eras in the school’s athletic history.
Next to the hall of fame is the Red Ventures Athletic Club, a private lounge where season-ticket holders can mingle before games and at halftime. It’s named for a local analytics firm that bought the club’s naming rights for an undisclosed price. Red Ventures hires several Davidson students as interns and full-time employees, Applegate said.
The Vance complex itself is named for a multisport star who earned a school-record nine letters before graduating from Davidson in 1926. His family donated $4 million to help kick-start the private fundraising campaign to pay for the facility.
Curry, who led Davidson to the Elite Eight in the 2008 NCAA tournament, contributed an undisclosed amount to the project.
> WHAT’S IN A NAME: In 2015, AEG Global Partnerships closed deals tied to naming rights for 11 facilities, the most it has ever done in a 12-month period, according to Nick Baker, the group’s senior vice president.
Seven properties are tied to new deals: Barclaycard Arena in Hamburg, Germany; Mercedes-Benz Arena, Berlin; Microsoft Theater, Los Angeles; AccorHotels Arena, Paris; PlayStation Theater, New York; Qantas Credit Union Arena, Sydney; and T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas, an agreement signed in 2015 and announced earlier this month.
On the events side, AEG renewed the Amgen Tour bicycle race in Pasadena. The total value of all 12 deals is north of $600 million, Baker said.
Don Muret can be reached at dmuret@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @breakground.
