Columnist Dean Juipe: UNLV hopes new arena aids teams

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2001 | 10:34 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

It's scaled down from where it started, having been reduced from three stories to two.

And it's way over budget, with projections now running $13 million for the final tab after $5 million initially was supposed to cover it.

Yet based on outward appearances, the Cox Pavilion -- which is under construction and attached to the Thomas & Mack Center -- will someday provide a beautiful alternate arena for UNLV's volleyball and women's basketball programs.

Now scheduled to be ready by late spring, the Cox may have caught your eye if you've attended any event at the T&M in recent months.

It has to be regarded as an asset to the university, yet this is a facility that has taken its lumps as it made its way from the drawing board to reality. Initiated with a $5 million contribution by Cox Cable, the building has since been restructured, delayed and bailed out by the state legislature when cost overruns became apparent and couldn't be ignored.

It has also served as an indirect focal point for this sore subject: If the women's sports programs at UNLV drew better crowds, the Cox Pavilion would never have been built.

"That's a fair notion," UNLV associate athletic director Lisa Kelleher said Tuesday. "(Women's head basketball coach) Regina (Miller) would like to remain in the Thomas & Mack, but only because she wants 6,000 screaming fans."

But she has been settling for a few hundred fans, and those people -- both in theory and in practical application -- will feel more comfortable in a cozy arena that will seat 2,500.

The same holds true for those few hundred -- sometimes few dozen -- spectators who enjoy seeing the women's volleyball team in action.

As it is, fans of the women's teams taking in a home game or match have been scattered through the bottom level of the T&M, where they lack the strength-in-numbers qualities of volume and contagious enthusiasm.

The new arena may rectify that impression.

"We aspire to fill the pavilion to the rafters," Kelleher said. "It'll be an intimate environment that will be state of the art and customer friendly. It'll be way better than what many of the fans remember from the Lied (North Gym)."

Prior to moving over to the T&M -- for gender-equity issues, as much as anything -- the women's teams were relegated to a North Gym that was frugal and relatively unappealing. The switch to the T&M added only a few extra customers to the teams' games, while increasing the university's costs due to the mere act of opening the Mack and paying its many employees.

Playing in an 18,000-seat arena hasn't been cost-effective, or, some might say, much fun when the vast majority of its seats are empty.

The Cox Pavilion will have locker rooms and a gymnasium on its lower level and its competitive floor (with room for two full-scale gyms when the retractable seats are pushed in) on the second level. The UNLV men's basketball team will also use the Cox for its practice sessions.

Essential or not, the new building will be quaint, busy and attractive.

Perhaps in time its negatives will be forgotten.