Touring the New Football Facilities (Part 2)

If you haven't seen Part 1 of our photo tour of the new construction at the Butts-Mehre building, check it out HERE.

And if you're interested, here's some artist renderings of the finished products HERE and HERE.

Moving on to part two, we head upstairs to take a look around the second floor of the building.

Here's the view from the second-floor deck. You can see the old Butts-Mehre building as well. The deck was expanded by about 12 feet out and there will be all new tiling installed on the outdoor plaza area. The old tiles -- which weighed about 100 pounds each -- were ripped out by hand by the construction crew.


If we zoom in, where the railing makes an L shape marks the point that separates the old plaza from the new addition.


The new-and-improved plaza will eventually have a tent installed that will allow for seating of up to 265 people for outdoor dining and events, overlooking Georgia's practice fields. Most of what you see here is the addition to the old plaza.

Inside the second floor will be primarily used as offices for the coaching staff. Here's a peek down the hallway that will lead to each coach's office, along with planning and film rooms.

The centerpiece of the second-floor offices will be the "War Room" where coaches gather to work on game planning and meeting. Much like the rest of the building, this room was designed to get as much natural light as possible.

The war room is surrounded by the individual coaches offices, which you can see here...

OK, this next one's a little blurry, but what you should take note of is the lowered floor. This is the film and editing suite, and the floor was deliberately lowered several inches. It will be insulated on the bottom then have wood panels installed on top -- different from the rest of the second floor. The reason for this is that they'll run all the wiring for the film suite between underneath the wooden floorboards, which can easily be removed so that UGA can swap out and rewire equipment as technology changes.

Of course, the best seats in the second floor of the house are reserved for the head coach. Here's a view of Mark Richt's office, which sits directly above the weight room. The floors have been specially insulated to reduce noise coming from the weight room below.

From Richt's office, glass on the south wall allows for a perfect view into the new indoor practice area. The flooring of his office actually curves out and hangs over the indoor practice area.

Richt also gets the luxury of an outdoor balcony which overlooks the practice fields on the East side of the building.

Here's another external view of Richt's office area. You can see the balcony in the middle of the photo. To the left, you can see the curvature of his office which extends into the indoor practice area and to the right is the rest of his office and reception area, which sits above the new weight room.

Connecting the old Butts-Mehre upper floors with the second-floor coaching offices will be an atrium. The walls are all transparent, which makes for an awesome view from outside.

And here's the inside of the atrium area, which will house the ever-expanding trophy room currently in the second-floor lobby of the original Butts-Mehre building.

Back outside, there's plenty more being done that isn't part of the actual building construction.

This used to be the upper practice field, where the specialists (kickers & punters) practiced. It's home to most of the construction equipment and personnel now, but will be returned to its original form by November.

One of the interesting aspects about what the planners did here, however, lies below the surface. Capturing water run-off was a big regulatory hurdle for the designers, particularly given the rather small area in which they were working. What they did was install two large tanks under the fields to capture water that they then use to irrigate the practice fields.

(Side note: Yes, I think my donning of a Georgia construction cap does destroy my objectivity.)

One other twist to the outdoor practice fields is this wall that separates the lower fields (closer to Stegeman) from the upper fields. Currently the lower fields are the only usable options while construction is ongoing. There used to be a steep hill here that separated the two, but the hill has been build up with the wall installed, thus affording coaches a better view of what's happening below.

And to wrap things up, a few more exterior shots to give you some perspective on what the average fan might get to see.

Even the dome of the original building is getting a facelift.

And if you zoom in, you can see that workers are repainting the dome.

Here's the view looking up at the middle of the building from the small side parking lot off Pinecrest.

From Pinecrest, a view of the second-floor additions, which were built atop the old weight room and team meeting rooms.

Here's the rear view of the full building from the upper practice fields near the track...
And from the opposite angle, with the new indoor practice area in the foreground...

And finally, a nice overhead of the whole project.

Again, huge thanks to Brandon Spoon for all his work on helping me put this together.

Keep an eye out for our video tour and feature story on the Butts-Mehre expansion this weekend.