SDSU Notebook : Aztec Bowl Is Selected as Proposed Complex Site

Aztec Bowl has been selected by university officials as the site of a proposed San Diego State athletic complex and arena.

The proposal will be discussed today in a meeting between university officials and members of the Associated Students, the university’s student governing body.

Larry Emond, president of the Associated Students, said the site was the best of three given serious consideration by the university.

“It’s centrally located and will help tie the university together,” Emond said Tuesday.

The 12,000-capacity Aztec Bowl was the home of SDSU football from 1936 until the Aztecs moved to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium in 1967. Since then, it has primarily been used for soccer and intramural sports.

The other on-campus sites considered were an area just north of Aztec Bowl now used as a parking lot and an area of vacant land north of Interstate 8.

Today’s meeting is one of three Edmond said will be held before the Associated Students could approve a plan to hold a student referendum in late March to seek an increase in student fees to pay for the proposed facility, whose centerpiece would be a 10,000-seat basketball arena.

Emond said the proposal would call for a $10 increase in the 1988-89 school year, followed by another $10 increase the next school year and an additional $25 in the third year, when the facility would be expected to be completed. SDSU students currently pay $350 per year in fees.

Students have twice rejected--in 1980 and 1985--attempts to increase the fee to pay for an athletic complex. This proposal would be different in that the increase would be phased in over three years.

“In the past, students didn’t want to pay for something they wouldn’t get a chance to use,” Emond said.

Emond estimated the cost to build the facility at $25 million to 30 million.

The use of the Aztec Bowl site would require the relocation of several other athletic facilities. A softball field to the south of the bowl would be converted to a soccer facility and a parking lot to the west of the bowl would be converted into a softball field.

Chris Singleton, a sophomore guard from Delgado Vocational Technical Junior College in New Orleans, has transferred to San Diego State.

Singleton, 6-feet 4-inches and 185 pounds, will not be eligible to play for the Aztecs until midway through next season. Singleton, a native of Houma, La., did not play at Delgado this season. He transferred to Delgado after playing as a freshman at Copiah-Lincoln Junior College in Wesson, Miss.