TAT: Practice Facility Crucial to Basketball Success

This article originally appeared on October 30, 2013 on The Arkansas Traveler website, uatrav.com.

Just before the Arkansas men’s and women’s basketball teams were about to begin practice, a leak in Bud Walton Arena forced both teams out of the facility.

The players and coaches had to find alternative places to workout and practice. Some practiced in the HPER and the men’s team even held a workout in Barnhill Arena, the basketball teams’ home until the 1993-’94 season.

Ultimately, the water was cleaned off of the court in Bud Walton and the floor was repaired so both teams could resume practicing in their current home.

This does not, however, take away from the fact that Arkansas has a glaring problem in its basketball program: it doesn’t have a practice facility. In fact, Arkansas is the only program in the Southeastern Conference without a basketball practice facility.

This is inexcusable.

Head coaches Mike Anderson and Tom Collen cannot be expected to lure the top recruits from across the country to Fayetteville if they can’t even tell them that they’ll always have a place to shoot hoops.

When Rutgers point guard Jerome Seagears decided to transfer, Anderson and the Razorbacks recruited him to come to Arkansas. Instead, he decided to go to Auburn.

Seagears’ decision shocked many people. The Razorbacks desperately needed a point guard, so he would get a lot of playing time, and they have a rich basketball tradition, which the Tigers don’t have.

The only reason why he would choose Auburn over Arkansas would have to be the facilities, or lack thereof in Arkansas’ case.

The men’s and women’s teams have to share Bud Walton, which means that when one team is practicing, the other team has no where to go.

Finding a time to practice around 12-15 players’ class schedules is hard enough for Anderson and Collen; worrying about the other team’s practice schedule further complicates this process.

Luckily, the people in charge of these things, mainly athletic director Jeff Long, are aware of this need.

In October, Long tweeted that he and Anderson were going to Fort Smith “to talk to an interested group of Razorback Foundation members” about a practice facility. Based on his tweets and comments to the media, it is clear that it is one of his top priorities.

Long has said that the project would cost between $20 and $25 million, which has caused some of the Arkansas fan base to be less supportive than Long would have guessed.

However, if Razorback fans want to return to the Final Four like the men have six times before and the women did in 1998, then they need to make it possible for Long to give Anderson and Collen what they need.