Plans for Titan Sports Complex Win Approval

The latest step in Cal State Fullerton’s push for a campus sports complex came off Tuesday as few have before--quickly and without a hitch.

A committee of the California State University trustees, meeting in Long Beach, approved unanimously and without discussion plans for the $6.24-million complex, whose centerpiece will be a 10,000-seat football stadium.

Committee approval--perhaps eased by the fact that no state university funds are involved--is tantamount to approval by the trustees today.

“We’re very excited,” Jewel Plummer Cobb, university president, said. “It’s been a long, long process.”

The approval of the schematic plans Tuesday gives Fullerton officials and supporters for the first time a clear vision of the form the long-sought complex will take.

It also clears the way for drawings to proceed and for the project to be opened for bids next June, said James B. Sharp, the university’s associate vice president for facility planning and construction.

The complex, which is being designed by the Irvine firm of Grillias Pirc Rosier Alves, is expected to be completed by January, 1991, Sharp said.

“What this means is that for the first time in 25 years, there are going to be adequate sports facilities on campus,” Sharp said. “I think it means a great deal to the athletic program. Everybody has been looking forward to this, but it’s been way off in the future. People began to wonder if it would ever start.”

In addition to the football stadium, a 1,500-seat baseball stadium replacing the current field and a third facility to accommodate soccer and track are to be built in the complex, which is to surround the site of the existing baseball stadium, southeast of the intersection of State College and Yorba Linda boulevards and north of Titan Gym.

All three facilities are designed to allow expansion.

A softball complex is already in place in the area, and existing tennis courts will be torn down and reconstructed, according to the project plan.

The football stadium, which is designed as a partially excavated bowl and will allow expansion to 30,000 seats, will provide at last a home for the vagabond Titan team, which has played in six home stadiums in its 18 seasons. The Titans have played their past four seasons in Santa Ana Stadium, a 12,000-seat facility that they have shared with Rancho Santiago College, several high schools and a swap meet.

Fullerton has sought an on-campus sports complex for more than 10 years. The current project was set in motion in 1983, after years of funding problems and legal wrangling, when the trustees approved an innovative plan calling for a sports complex to be built in conjunction with an on-campus Marriott Hotel.

About $3.6 million of the financing for the complex comes from a direct grant from the city of Fullerton’s Redevelopment Agency. The agency is advancing the remaining $3.1 million, which the university is to repay through proceeds from the hotel land lease.

Because of the funding arrangement, the ground breaking for the hotel last month was considered a final go-ahead for the sports complex plans.

The baseball stadium will replace the current facility, which seats about 850 in portable bleachers and is considered one of the poorest among schools with a tradition of success such as Fullerton’s.

But beyond providing upgraded facilities for their teams, Fullerton athletic department officials long have pointed to the sports complex as at least a partial cure for the department’s ongoing financial difficulties.

Fullerton officials often have cited the lack of an on-campus stadium as a reason for low attendance--football attendance averaged just more than 4,000 last season--and for the resulting financial difficulties.

“We hope that attendance will grow because of our own on-campus stadium,” Cobb said. “People will have less problem getting to the games, and it will be a visible structure of enthusiasm.”

Opponents of the project doubt the team’s ability to draw in any facility and have charged that a campus stadium is an unnecessary extravagance.

“Time will tell,” Cobb said.