Q&A with Clemson Athletic Director Terry Don Phillips Part 2

Phillips said Clemson wants to add three more years on Dabo Swinney's contract.

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Tue May 22 16:43:41 GMT-04:00 2012

CLEMSON – This is the second part of our sit-down with Clemson Athletic Director Terry Don Phillips.

If you haven’t seen the first part, which covers possible realignment, expansion and the television contracts, you can find that here…./view/story.do?id=10621

However, there were some other questions we asked, including about the progress of the facilities upgrades and the contracts of head coach Dabo SwinneyDabo Swinney

Head Coach

View Full Profile and his assistant coaches. He also talks about what he is looking for from the basketball program.

TN: What is the latest report on the facilities?

TDP: Of course the indoor facility is going very well. We are ahead of schedule. We had some rain last week- we need the rain so we aren’t going to say that we don’t want it to rain. We are ahead of schedule right now with the indoor facility. We are still looking at December to complete it. It is very possible that it will be early December. We are finalizing the conceptual design of the new basketball facility that is going to be constructed on the south side of the Ave of Champions- we will have a walkway over to dressing rooms, offices, recruiting rooms, and practice courts. I’m excited and anxious for people to see the renderings of it. It’s going to be fantastic. One of the things that we’re going to be talking to our people about to garner their support, is that Clemson basketball has had some great coaches, some great players, and really some outstanding teams, but the problem is that it has been inconsistent. We’ve got to somehow break that cycle of inconsistency and this new facility would be parallel to what we first had to do with the West End Zone when we first came here.

The West End Zone was extremely important to give us a tool that we can recruit effectively with and put our student-athletes and coaches in an environment that they can train in a first-class fashion. So the basketball facility is conceptually in regard to the impact that we believe it can have similar to that of the West End Zone. That’s a priority. Baseball fundraising is going well. We need to get the baseball facility done. Actually, that’s a facility that the way it’s designed- you look at the West End Zone you think it’s finished, but there are still components that we need to add to it like the oculus and the museum, but we just got through adding the training table. The dining facility is really nice and it is a first class facility. As you raise your funds you continue to build and build your infrastructure. We believe that we can develop the baseball facility where we can go ahead and do our dressing rooms and our team rooms and then as our funds continue to come in we can continue to build. We think that’s going to happen in a very timely fashion.

The Highway 93 project that will be a significant addition to tennis and Riggs Field- that’s been delayed because that was matching funds from us, the city and the state. That has been delayed until after football season because they only had one bidder on it. Going back- not to the drawing board- but tweaking it and going back to the financials and to bid- we’ll start after football season. That will be a significant enhancement to Riggs Field and the tennis center. We are moving right along on all of our projects and I’m glad that we have the basketball facility conceptually finalized- the President has signed off on it and now we have to run all of our traps through the state, through the Board of Trustees as we well know.

TN: What is the status of Swinney’s contract?

TDP: We still continue to talk with his agent. That’s a continuous process. There is some tweaking to Dabo’s contract that we need to do so we are talking through it as we speak. He’s got three years remaining on his existing contract. We want to put three more years on it and make it a six-year contract and then we have some fine-tuning to do with the total contract for some specific provisions. Chad [Morris] and Brent [Venables] – they are done.