Spalding University buys land for sports fields

• Spalding has been looking for a site near its campus for sports fields for about a half-dozen years.
• The school now uses fields owned by Louisville Collegiate School and Jeffersontown High School.
• A $20 million capital campaign will be proposed, with $6-$7 million earmarked for athletic fields.

Spalding University, which competes in NCAA Division III and has 16 athletic teams, plans to add another major sports offering — playing fields, a few blocks from the main campus south of Broadway.

The campus is expanding west from its main site between Second and Fifth streets to 7.2 acres of mostly vacant industrial and commercial-type land that takes up almost a city block in an area bounded by 8th, 9th, Breckinridge and Kentucky streets.

Spalding purchased the two-tract parcel at 939 S. 9th St. and 916 S. 8th St. — which includes an old car dealership building, for just under $1 million in February.

Spalding President Tori Murden McClure and other university administrators will meet this week with the school’s board of trustees to discuss launching a $20 million capital campaign for school improvements — about $6 million to $7 million of which would be for the athletic fields, Murden said.

Other expenditures would go for classrooms, library facilities, scholarships and other needs. No tuition money would be spend on the athletic fields, Murden said.

The project would be done in phases on a “pay as you go” basis, as money is raised, she said. The aim would be to have the site converted in about two years.

The school has men’s teams for basketball, baseball, cross country, golf soccer and track and field and women’s teams for basketball, bowling, cross country, golf, soccer, softball, track and field and volleyball. The school was once Nazareth College, a four-year Catholic institution for women.

Spalding currently leasessports fields for soccer off Newburg Road from Louisville Collegiate School, softball fields at Jeffersontown High School on Old Six Mile Lane and Derby City Baseball fields near Poplar Level Road. The school also has leasing arrangements with Oxmoor Country Club for its golf teams and E. P. “Tom” Sawyer State Park for cross country.

The school uses Manual High School’s track and field facilities, and some events possibly could be held at Spalding’s new site, officials say.

Murden and others who showed off the site this week — Spalding Athletic Director Roger Burkman, Chief Financial Officer Mark Hohmann and Chief Advancement Officer Bert Griffin — said they consider adding sports fields a high-priority project that will help round out the university’s amenities, raise its profile, help with recruitment and add more green space to the campus and the neighborhood.

It would offer a site for home games the school plays in the St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and would draw the community to a revitalized site that currently is acres of concrete and overgrown weeds.

Murden pedaled onto the property from a parking lot on a discarded bike she found nearby. As a champion athlete who skied to the South Pole and rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean, she doesn’t consider intercollegiate athletics to be an “extracurricular” offering but rather an “extra” part of the main curriculum, she said.

Athletics teaches discipline and collaboration with others, among other things, and “the very best of students are scholar athletes,” Murden said. She has a master’s degree in creative writing from Spalding, in addition to a bachelor’s degree from Smith College, a master’s of divinity degree from Harvard and a law degree from University of Louisville.

She envisions up to four playing or practice fields for soccer and softball and potentially for field hockey and lacrosse, which the school might add.

Arrangements also could be made for nearby schools such as Presentation Academy, St. Francis School, Simmons College and the Brown School to use the fields, said Rick Barney, a spokesman for Spalding.

Spalding purchased the site from Dover Resources and Huber Book Enterprises, Griffin said. School officials are eying a parcel for sale across Kentucky Street that potentially could be used for parking.

Reporter Martha Elson can be reached at (502) 582-7061. Follow her on Twitter at @MarthaElson_cj.