Tulane University Athletics received a $10 million gift from Don and Lora Peters to help enhance and upgrade the university’s athletic facilities.
The gift will help further the “Investing in Excellence” campaign, a facility-driven capital campaign that will focus on prioritizing Tulane’s athletic facilities on campus and off campus.
“This isn’t the first gift from Don to support athletic’s mission,” Kortne Gosha, deputy athletic director for operations and capital projects, said. “He’s a driven individual, and so to help the athletic department champion certain initiatives, he supported the academic center and its renovation a couple of years ago, and as a conclusion of that, essentially, his question was: ‘what’s next?’”
Some of the most recent complete projects in phase one of the “Investing in Excellence” campaign included renovating the football locker room, the baseball clubhouse, the turf in Yulman Stadium and the natatorium.
“Their gift is kind of the bookends of the campaign because their initial gift allowed us to hire consultants to do a master plan,” Katie Acuff, associate vice president for advancement, said.
“Their gift will come back to play in phase three when we do the bigger add-on to the Wilson Center.”
Phase two intends to implement a multipurpose indoor bubble over Brown Field and tennis facilities. Phase three will include a new weight room, new sports medicine injury space, rehabilitation space, a new area to store equipment and a women’s sports suite, according to Gosha.
“There’s a number of ways donors can give and make an impact, and they’re all meaningful and important, but it can sometimes be hard to physically see that impact of an endowment or of a scholarship gift,” Justin Berger, senior associate athletic director for development, said. “It is really easy and immediate to see the impact of a gift to a building.”
“I think we’re the blueprint for intercollegiate athletics,” Gosha said. It’s important that “its athletics reputation matches the academic reputation on a national scale.”