DEKALB — Officials at Northern Illinois University recently broke ground on a new 80,000-plus square foot indoor athletic training center called the Kenneth and Ellen Chessick Practice Facility that is expected to give student athletes in their 17 sports programs a competitive edge.

The Chessick Practice Facility will include an artificial turf football field, a four-lane spring track, batting cages, field goal nets, long jump pits, play clock system, 120 yards of hitting space with netting for golfers to track the full flight and trajectory of the ball and several other athletic features. It will be the first year-round training facility for student athletes on the NIU campus.
“The new facility will allow our student athletes first access to a year-round training facility,” said Associate Vice President/Director Athletics for Northern Illinois University Jeff Compher. “Currently, Northern Illinois does not have an indoor facility for year-round training. Our varsity sports programs have limited access to the DeKalb Recreation Center, which is a community facility that we must rent. Our winter conditioning for sports teams in the past have also taken place on gym courts, which have a higher chance of injury for our student athletes training for turf sports.”
According to Compher, the Chessick Practice Facility will be one of the best athletic training facilities in the country.
“In preparation for the design of the Chessick Practice Center, I organized several trips to tour a number of existing facilities in our conference and our region,” said Compher. “We took along potential donors to the facilities as well as our campus architects and other university administrators. Through these visits we were able to discover what works best and what could be improved upon in each facility. We were able to take the information we learned on these trips and come up with a design for a facility that we believe will be one of the best facilities in the country and certainly the Midwest.”
The Chessick Practice Center will give NIU “the edge in recruiting for all our sports,” said Compher.
“The lack of a facility to this point has been used against us in the recruitment of student athletes to NIU,” said Compher. “This will no longer be the case.”
The indoor athletic training center will be conveniently located on the north side of the Jeffery and Kimberly Yordon Center on the NIU campus.
“Our facility is located adjacent to our existing Yordon Center, which houses our strength and conditioning area, academic services, athletic training room and football locker room,” said Compher. “The location of the facility will allow our student athletes to have everything they need in one area for daily training and academic schedules.”
University officials hope to complete the facility by the time classes start in the fall of 2013.
The projected cost of the facility is $9.5 million. Dr. Kenneth and Ellen Chessick donated $3 million for the naming rights of the facility. NIU has collected $8.7 million in donations for the construction of the facility.
To donate money for the construction of the facility, visit www.niufoundation.org.