The new turf field has been installed at Scrappy Moore Field for weeks now. If all goes as planned, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team's practice facility will have a new scoreboard, play clock and goal post in place by Sunday.
At McKenzie Arena, new LG flat-screen televisions were hung last week in many of the football coaches' offices. Like the turf, scoreboard and other items at Scrappy, the televisions were the result of donations to the program.
As Mocs coach Russ Huesman begins preparing for his season season at his alma mater, the gifts just keep on coming.
"The more people you have involved in your program, the better it is," he said. "You can have one money guy and you're asking him, asking him or whatever, but to have so many people, so many people involved, it's pretty nice."
The major renovation to Scrappy started with a $500,000 donation to the program by Renee Haugerud and John Murphy in February 2009. Most of that money went toward installing an artificial turf field, along with new irrigation and a bathroom.
Having a bathroom might not seem like a big addition, but for years the first thing visitors to Scrappy saw when they entered the facility by the Riverwalk was a port-o-potty - which UTC had to pay for each season.
"You walk in and there's a port-o-potty, and that's the way it's been," Huesman said. "Now, you're going to see the scoreboard, goal post and the new field."
The scoreboard and play clock were donated by Coca-Cola, Huesman said, and one of his former teammates, Don Lepard, who helped remodel the coaches' offices last year, volunteered to handle the installation, which would have cost $7,000.
Former Mocs kicker Rodney Allen offered to raise the money for a new goal post after Huesman told him that UTC wasn't buying a new one, but was going to keep using a smaller, moveable one instead.
Allen reached out to some former players, Mocs fans and friends and raised about $8,000 to buy the goal post and net. In all, Allen said, more than 20 people chipped in to cover the cost.
"It took a lot of support from some good folks in the town that care about football," Allen said.
Athletic director Rick Hart said the money for the TVs came from new initiative called the Huesman Henchmen Fund, which was started by a group of supporters who wanted to annually provide the program with money "for things that ordinarily we would not expend our resources on."
Because of the team's limited meeting space, the Mocs often crowded into the coaches' offices to watch film, either on their own or with their coaches. Having a bunch of players squinting at a computer screen isn't the best way to prepare for an opponent, offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield said.
"I'll have to meet with four quarterbacks here in my office and to have a good vision of the whole field on a 50-inch TV is nice and makes our job easier," he said. "We're not just crammed up and sitting on top of each other."
Between the new weight room for all sports that opened in January 2009 to the renovated practice facility to the upgrades in numerous other areas, a lot has changed since Huesman was hired in December 2008.
"A lot of people stepped up and were generous and thought they were good things to have," he said of the donations. "Hopefully we're spending their money in the right way to make our program better, and I think they know that."