MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Anyone who's driven by the northwest corner of Middle Tennessee State University lately will have seen the progress being made on many facets of Build Blue Phase One, most notably the frame of the new Student Athlete Performance Center in the North End Zone of Floyd Stadium.

But those who have come to camps, taken a walk on campus or just been a part of CUSTOMS this summer will have likely seen many more construction projects around the MTSU Athletics Complex than just the one featuring the large crane.

To update Blue Raider fans on everything happening in the world of construction in MTSU Athletics, Staff Writer Sam Doughton sat down with Larry Maples, Associate AD for Equipment and Capital Projects, and Nathan Wallach, Assistant AD for Broadcast Technology and Gameday Operations, to learn about all that's happened these past few months with the SAPC, the new video board in Floyd Stadium, the new control room and the new loading dock in the Murphy Center.

Student-Athlete Performance Center on Track for 2025

The newest presence on the Athletics side of campus that you can't miss is, of course, the SAPC, which had its final beam placement ceremony earlier this month. Maples said the project is on-schedule so far to open the building, which will house a new weight room, training room, equipment room, football offices and meeting rooms, among many other amenities, ahead of the 2025 football season.

It's a dream turned into reality for Maples, a 2013 alumnus of Middle Tennessee with a degree in Engineering Technologies, who has been a part of the planning for this new building when it was just an idea with no concrete plans. Seeing the steel go up and concrete poured has been special, Maples said.

"It's one thing to see it on paper and know it in your head," Maples said. "It's another to walk through the building and actually experience the size and scope that goes with what you've planned and see it come to life."

Fans can expect to see the building change game-to-game when they attend football games at Floyd Stadium this fall, Maples noted, explaining that if it all goes to plan, the building will be "100 percent dried in" by the end of the season, allowing construction work to accelerate in the interior of the building.

New Video Board to be ready for Game One against Tennessee Tech

Wallach had similarly good news to report on the all-LED videoboard's progress in the opposite end zone that's predicated the shutdown of Faulkinberry Drive for the better part of the past month, saying that the board is on track to be fully installed by August, allowing Wallach and his staff plenty of time to test it and troubleshoot any issues ahead of football's season opener on August 31.

The video board physically will take up the same space as the old scoreboard, allowing for the old supports to be utilized once again. But the LED footprint has increased from 23 feet by 36 feet to nearly 34 feet by 60 feet. Wallach said the increased footprint will allow for full screen replays, most notably, but also give the production team more leeway on certain in-game segments as well, particularly once the new control room comes online.

The new video board will also have a camera platform on top, a change in the layout of Floyd Stadium due to the construction of the SAPC. Programs must provide at least one endzone cam location for TV broadcasts and team filming, and the design of the SAPC predicated a change from the North End Zone to the South at MTSU.

Wallach noted MTSU's partnership with Daktronics and Piros Signs, who were instrumental in the design and installation of the new video boards in Murphy Center ahead of last season, has come through for this project this summer, noting that many of the same folks who installed the Murphy Center boards are now installing the Floyd Stadium project.

"They're a very talented group who are out there in the hot sun welding," Wallach said. "It's going well, it's big. It's exciting, from our vantage point in the tower, to see it go up."

New Control Room set to be operational ahead of Basketball Season

Wallach might be even more excited about the potential of MTSU's new broadcast control room, currently being built in the southeast corner of the Murphy Center's concourse level. Balancing the Parent Company's schedule, who's been contracted for all athletics projects but the video board installation this summer, has pushed the date of opening the new control room back slightly from the dream date of the start of football to closer to mid-October.

But working simultaneously with Take One Broadcast Solutions out of Hendersonville, Tenn., who are building the racks of tech that will make up the core of the control room in their warehouse ahead of installation at the Murphy Center, will help keep things on schedule once construction itself wraps up in September.

"Fortunately, with all this gear, they're actually going to build our entire control room in their warehouse," Wallach said. "Light it up, make sure everything is working, test everything and then they will break it down with the interconnects in between the racks and bring the complete racks, set them in the space, reconnect them. Then, we should be good to go."

Wallach said the new technology that will come with the control room is when fans will really begin to notice the upgrades to both the basketball and football video boards, as the modern system will grant the in-game video board team the ability to use cameras with greater clarity, have more channels of replay available and be able to unlock more power to do in-game fan engagement, such as showing split screen feeds.

And for the folks working behind the scenes, Wallach said, the operations should be much, much smoother.

"I'm hoping we can show fans in November the difference when we get the new cameras and new signal flow worked out," Wallach said.

New Loading Dock work to resume in near future

Maples said during the course of starting construction on the new loading dock for the Murphy Center, which will be located in the Southeast corner (the one closest to the press box tower in Floyd Stadium), workers ran into issues with the water lines that head into Murphy Center, specifically finding them located more shallowly in the ground than was originally anticipated.

"Originally, we were trying to have this open for game one of this (football) season," Maples said. "That was going to give us a little more control for traffic flow."

That caused work on the loading dock to pause as contingencies were considered and now the project is projected to be done closer to the start of basketball season than the start of football. With the planned Phase Two of Build Blue likely to affect the Northeast corner of the Murphy Center, where the current loading dock is located, most profoundly, Maples said the Southeast corner, which is also located on the main "industrial" hallway and avoids the traffic complications of Middle Tennessee Boulevard, quickly stood out as the best spot for trucks to load in and out equipment for concerts, sporting events, graduations and everything else the Glass House hosts for the Middle Tennessee community.