New Facility a credit to the ‘Colonel’

When you walk into Romney Stadium Thursday evening to witness the USU football season opener, you shouldn’t be surprised if you have the same reaction that much of the team themselves had when they first saw it Aug. 10.

With the team dressed in their uniforms without pads for pictures on Media Day, an awed silence came over much of the the players as they looked toward the top of the new north end zone facility to the new jumbo tron as it played crystal clear Aggie football highlights from 2006.

“It’s the quietest I’ve ever heard them,” third-year Aggie Head Coach Brent Guy said.

The new $12.5 million structure has made the 27-year-old home of the Aggies look, by a general consensus of anybody who has been around the program for a long time, a whole lot better.

“It means a lot,” Aggie senior wide receiver Kevin Robinson said. “It means they’re trying to make a change in this program. It’s only going to bring in more people that want to play for this team and contribute.”

The man to thank for the much-needed addition to the good of the entire athletic department is the director of athletics himself, Randy Spetman.

Spetman, who is called “Colonel” by those he works with thanks to his long career in the military, is now in his fourth year as the Aggie AD. He has been the moving force to getting the edifice from a lot of talk and planning to an actual building.

Just ask Guy.

“I don’t think anyone in their wildest dreams would think that we could get a building of that magnitude up with the amount of money we had,” Guy said. “I know of no other AD in America that could have got done what’s been done in that building. I don’t say that because he’s my boss; I say that because it’s the absolute truth. When people see it, they’re gonna be amazed at the amount of money he had to work with, and what he put up.”

Spetman gave a handful of media a tour of the 50,000-square-foot building Aug. 10 – including the back half of it, which has been named the Dale Mildenburger Sports Medicine Complex in honor of Mildenburger, who has been the head trainer at USU for 33 years.

Only the first floor, which houses team locker rooms, an equipment room and the sports medicine area, is completed.

The second and third floors, which now feature only naked concrete and scattered tools, will one day house coaches’ offices and team meeting rooms for all 16 university sports.

Despite the fact that those floors were empty and bare, Spetman explained with ease and at length which rooms would be where.

Spetman credited the good will of donors and volunteers in the community as being the major reason the department has been able to have such a building built.

Tens of thousands of dollars have been saved, Spetman said, from volunteer work, which includes a group of 50 people who came into the facility in early August to help clear and hang many of the doors.

“We’ve hung every door ourselves in this building,” Spetman said. “That’s part of the savings of this building.”

Spetman also noted the windows are salvaged glass from the Crossroads Mall in Salt Lake City, which saved the program more tens of thousands.

Spetmen said the track and field Head Coach Greg Gensel personally painted part of the first floor as his donation to the building, saving perhaps $1,000 in labor costs.

“The community has contributed a lot,” USU senior running back Aaron Lesue said. “We need to go and show them, ‘Hey, you’ve done a lot for us. We’re gonna lay it on the line every weekend for you.’ We’ve had an older facility for a long time. It’s nice to feel good and go into a nice locker room.”

The kind of leadership that radiates from Spetman makes sense when one finds out he is an Air Force Academy graduate with a 28-year career in the military, which featured him in the role of chief of bomber planning in Desert Shield and Desert Storm as well as chief of Command and Control Division, and operations directorate at the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany.

“He shocks you every day,” Guy said. “I’ll say it this way: Time will still judge me if I’m the correct man to straighten this program out, but he’s already been judged. That’s evident.”

One Sunday over the summer Guy said he came early to check on some things in the building and found Spetman sweeping an area by himself.

“Colonel, what are you doing?” Guy asked.

Spetman responded, “Well, if this area is clean and it’s easy to move around in, we can get lot more work done.”

“(The building) is a testament for what he stands for,” Guy added. “He talks the talk and he walks the walk every day. You want to see it? Come down here and see who’s in that building, making things happen is Randy Spetman.”

-samuel.hislop@aggiemail.usu.edu

Photo “JumboTron” caption :the jumbo tron sits atop the new north end zone Facility of Romney stadium. One of its key features will be instant replay for fans.