Indoor practice facility construction now slated for early 2024

Ordinarily, Board of Regents meetings don’t hold much interest for fans of a university’s sports teams. Heck, even for the most ardent followers of the academics at an institution, these every-other-month meetings are a slog of parliamentary procedure.

This Thursday though, the Washington State Board of Regents is expected to approve moving into the design phase for the Indoor Practice Facility, now known as a Taylor Sports complex.

Don’t get too excited yet, though: it won’t start, at the earliest, until the winter of 2024, more than two years after the school announced they’d secured commitments for the funding.

The schedule calls for the Regents to formally approve entering the design phase at their November meeting with design beginning early next year. The Regents would then approve the budget for the complex 14 months from now with construction slated to begin in “Winter 2024”, which presumably means “as soon as football season is over”. Athletics expects design of the facility to cost $2.4 million, all of which will be covered by private donations.

In total, it’s now expected to cost north of $27 million to construct the complex. Once the design is approved, we can likely expect a timeline for finishing but I’d assume the hope is to have it done in time for Fall 2024 sports.

Importantly at least, it looks like there’s now a pen-to-paper schedule for when we can expect this much needed facility to get built. WSU has lagged way behind many schools, even those in the Mountain West, when it comes to a facility of this time for a while and it’s needed not just to serve football, but soccer, track and field, golf and more. Getting this off the ground has seemed like a saga but it appears, for now, that saga is coming to an end.