Years of anticipation came to fruition on Thursday as Troy University announced plans for the construction of the Veterans Memorial Stadium North End Zone Facility.

Set to be completed before Troy’s home opener against Boise State in 2018, the new facility will serve football players, coaches and fans as well as the Troy community.

“There have been a lot of levels of commitment, from the institution, from athletics, from donors and from our fans,” said Troy’s Director of Athletics Jeremy McClain. “This is about filling a vision, moving forward as a program and seeing the success.”

The End Zone Facility has been in the works for nearly a decade and when McClain came to the university in 2015, this was a project he committed to completing.

“Over the past 15 months I have thought about this day quite a bit,” McClain said. “The idea and the vision for this was born many years ago out of necessity when we began to outgrow our facilities. Over the last 15 months we have been laser focused on trying to get this done.”

The new facility will consist of four floors with each floor offering state of the art equipment for the players and coaches.

The first floor will consist of strength and conditioning area as well as a nutrition station or “fueling station.” The second floor will include a locker room and a mudroom with a cool down pool. Players will have access to a player’s lounge as well as a sports medicine/ training facility.

The hope of head coach Neal Brown and the rest of the athletic department is that the new facility will be a spark in the growth of the Troy football program and Troy Athletics.

“We are growing right now as a university and as an athletic department,” Brown said. “You have to do things that are necessary to stay at that level. If you don’t do that you get passed by.”

There is also hope that the new facility will help with recruiting.

“Recruiting is the lifeblood of your program,” Brown said. “It is a game and it is about players. We are having success right now because Brandon Silvers is the best quarterback in our league, Jordan Chunn is an NFL running back, Rashad Dillard is the best pass rusher in our league. We have been selling this vision of this building to guys that we have been recruiting now for almost two years.”

The players are not the only ones to reap the benefits of the new facility. The game day experience for the fans is also sure to increase.

The facility will include club seating for 402 people with terrace space on top of that that will offer concessions. There will also be a 2,500 square foot club space that will offer high-end concessions and a bar.

“We didn’t want this just to be a building,” McClain said. “We want it to be a center of activity.”

On top of the facility there will be a brand new video board that will be 35 feet by 90 feet. To put that in perspective, the board that is on the other end of the stadium is 23 feet by 54 feet.

“We are going to have both those boards in play,” McClain said. “It’s going to be a great in game fan experience for us.”

The facility will sit just 30 feet behind the back line of the north end zone and will stretch 370 feet across filling in the end zone.

“We use the term ‘bowl in,’” McClain said. “It’s going to be a real cozy setting. Opposing teams are not going to be excited about coming in here to play us.”

The total square footage of the building, which includes both the interior and the top of the building, is 77,000 square feet.

With the announcement of the facility grouped in with the construction of Trojan Arena, the renovation of the softball complex and golf course, McClain believes Troy has some of the best facilities in the southeast.

“I think it puts us near the top of the list in the southeast,” McClain said. “If you look at what we have done in the last 10 years, you would be hard pressed to find anybody else, especially in our conference and in the group of five, that has made that type of commitment and ended up with the quality facilities we have.”

One person that was extremely excited to hear the news was former Trojan head coach Larry Blakeney who was involved from the very beginning.

“It’s beautiful day,” Blakeney said. “I am so proud for Jeremy McClain, Neal Brown, Chancellor Jack Hawkins and the board. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun for them. It is tremendously rewarding for me to have been around from the inception of the plans.”

The official groundbreaking of the new facility will be this Saturday about 30 minutes prior to Troy’s football game against Appalachian State at 2:30 p.m.