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Provo • If potential recruits around the country were unsure if BYU is committed to improving its standing in the country's college basketball landscape, they should not be now.
That was the message BYU basketball coaches Dave Rose and Jeff Judkins and high-ranking athletic department officials delivered Tuesday as the school unveiled plans to renovate and upgrade the Marriott Center arena and construct a long-awaited and state-of-the-art basketball practice facility on the 44-year-old multipurpose arena's east side.
Upgrades to the Marriott Center include the addition of chair seats to fill the entire lower and a new center-hanging scoreboard with 24x18-foot LED video boards on all four sides. The Marriott Center Annex, which is what officials are calling the new facility, will be approximately 38,000 square feet and replace the road that runs between the MC and the BYU Broadcasting Building.
"This was really important," said Rose, who signed a new five-year contract on Monday. "This was something that we needed to have happen to allow us to stay nationally relevant."
Rose downplayed the fact that his new contract, which will take him through the 2019-20 season, was announced a day before the facilities upgrades, but Senior Associate Athletic Director Brian Santiago did not.
"They are tied together, and we wanted to make a loud statement of our commitment to the excellence of our basketball program, and how committed we are to stay nationally relevant and chase our dreams of a national championship," Santiago said.
BYU declined to divulge the cost of the projects, but said they are being privately funded, including funding for future maintenance costs. Rose said "quite a few" former players have been involved in the funding and fundraising.
"There are a lot of really kind people that support BYU across the country," he said.
Speaking as players from both teams looked on in the back of the room, Judkins, who led the women's team to the NCAA Sweet 16 last spring, said the women are just as excited as the men for the new facility.
"I mean, this is something that we have really wanted so badly for our program to make us better," Judkins said.
Rose said former BYU president Cecil Samuelson is "the man who first started talking about this years ago" and thanked the administration for making it happen.
Renovations inside the Marriott Center will begin around May 1 and are expected to be completed by late summer. The student section, known as the ROC, will remain behind the West basket and every student who wants to attend games will be accommodated, despite the loss of some 1,900 seats, Santiago said.
The sideline configuration — scorer's table, press tables and team benches — will be flipped back to where it was before the addition of several thousand blue chair seats on the north side a few years ago.
BYU officials checked out video boards in arenas across the country, but especially studied the new ones installed by the Utah Jazz in EnergySolutions Arena before the 2013-14 season and patterned them similarly.
Ground will be broken for the Annex this summer. The project should be completed by the fall of 2016.
"It will be state-of-the-art, and it will be beautiful, and it will give our student-athletes a chance to come here and chase their dreams and their passions," Santiago said.
The Annex will feature a replica of the Marriott Center floor with added shooting areas on both ends of the court, a strength and conditioning center, a training room with hydrotherapy, meeting rooms, team lounges and study areas, and office suites for men's and women's basketball coaches.
It will also include a Basketball Hall of Honor to showcase both programs' histories.
"This commitment is for our current players who will be here when this project is completed," Rose said. "It is obviously a commitment to our former players, for their sweat and blood and all the other things they have put into this program. … But it is [also] for the players who have committed to us who are playing high school basketball right now, or that are serving missions, that have played here and are going to return."
Twitter: @drewjay —
Highlights of BYU's basketball facilities upgrades
• A 38,000-square foot annex will be constructed on the east side of the 44-year-old Marriott Center and house a basketball practice facility, a strength and conditioning center, and more.
• The Marriott Center will be renovated to include padded chair seats in the entire lower bowl. They will replace benches there and decrease arena capacity to 19,000.
• The arena's center-hanging scoreboard will be replaced with four new LED video boards approximately 24 feet wide and 18 feet high facing in all directions.