Northwestern announced the Trienens Performance Center center Tuesday morning, which is set to be a state-of-the-art practice facility for the basketball and volleyball program. Athletic director Jim Phillips met with the media to discuss the impact the new facility will have in the long-term.
Here are some quotes from the press conference:
- On the announcement: “It’s just a spectacular day, when you think about the announcement we made earlier today, to get a $20 million gift from Howard Trienens. There’s no words to describe the magnitude that this gift will mean.”
- On the need for a new practice facility: “We started to get squeezed in [the fieldhouse] you see here, and the most we could get out was a court and a half. A tally of 64 schools that we went to initially to do the lakefront complex, we probably did 30 to 35 schools that we did with basketball to try to get some ideas. It’s come together.”
- On Howard Trienens: “We can’t thank Howard Trienens enough. He as ‘45 undergraduate degree, a ‘49 law degree, has been everything to Northwestern. He’s given 44 straight years to Northwestern in some capacity.”
- On the possible impact the facilities will have: “We didn't do it with just the Big Ten in mind, we did it nationally. We wanted to do everything that we possibly could to put us in an elite area.”
- On the Men’s Basketball program: “I think we’re just scratching the surface. But what I will tell you is, with what we announced with Welsh-Ryan last spring and what we announced today, that has to give an injection of encouragement about where the program is going.”
- On importance of high-level facilities: “I don’t know many programs that are elite that don’t have [state-of-the-art facilities]. To me it’s a sign of investment, an investment in a program that’s really important to us. Some of the past failures, that we haven’t achieved what we wanted to, shouldn’t be placed on a coach or a group of student-athletes.”