It's been like most summers for the ASU football team. Twice a week, dozens of players show up at the practice fields for informal workouts. No coaches, no whistles. Just the players calling their own plays and running their own drills.
There is some different scenery this summer, though. Just south of the practice fields — northeast of Rural and University — sits a behemoth of a white bubble. Sixty-six feet high, 225 feet wide and 460 feet long, the bubble will house two football fields.
Both will have endzones, with one measuring 75 yards long and the other 45 yards.
"It'll nice to get out of the heat," said ASU sophomore kicker Thomas Weber. "I just hope I'll be able to punt and do kickoffs in there."
ASU broke ground on the $8.6 million project on May 14 and it is scheduled for completion on Aug. 1, just in time for the ASU football practice.
The air-conditioned bubble will give ASU football players a welcome rest from the round-the-clock desert heat. It will also end the longstanding tradition of the two-week long ASU football camp in Camp Tontozona.
While the team will still scrimmage up at "Camp T" on Aug. 16, the remainder of its summer practices will take place in Tempe.
"I'm not going to miss Camp T at all," senior linebacker Mike Nixon said. "We're staying in bunks and it's terrible conditions over there. The scrimmage is the highlight of it anyways, so as long as we're doing that, we're good."
The ASU athletic department plans to use the Indoor Practice Facility for more than just the football team. It will be used by other ASU sports teams, the ASU marching band, ASU summer camps and ASU intramural programs.
The University announced Friday that it selected FieldTurf as the playing surface that will be inside the bubble.
The Indoor Practice Facility is one of a couple of big construction projects that the athletic department is developing at the moment.
Just south of the bubble, the University is working on the $19.4 million Weatherup Center, a state-of-the-art training center for the ASU men's and women's basketball team that is scheduled to open May 2009.
Reach the reporter at: alex.espinoza@asu.edu.
