William Porter Payne and Porter Otis Payne Indoor Athletic Facility

Athens, GA
Construction Cost: $24,277,973
Area / Square Feet: 102,306
Occupancy Date: January 2017

Home to some of the most prestigious college athletic programs in the nation, the University of Georgia now has an indoor athletic facility that provides a state-of-the-art environment for recruiting and developing world-class student-athletes.

While a perennial national title contender, UGA was the last program in the Southeastern Conference to build a multisport athletic facility of this kind, which includes a 100-yard football practice field, a 65-meter track runway and jumping pits, and a versatile netting system that provides indoor practice

areas for all of the university’s athletics programs.

The facility’s site within the crowded campus athletics district posed a significant challenge, as the building needed to house a regulation-size football field while being appropriately sized to blend into the surrounding campus fabric without compromising the adjacent outdoor practice fields or the nearby Butts-Mehre athletics building. The connection to Butts-Mehre

allows two outdoor practice fields to be maintained while concentrating all football operations under one roof. To mitigate the size of the facility, the design team lowered the level of the indoor field to align with the outdoor fields and chose exterior materials that complement the surrounding campus

context.