We want to thank everyone for coming today. This has been a dream come true. There have been a lot of people involved and we appreciate the work that you have done.

I want to welcome everyone today. This project has been made possible because of the leadership of the Loyalty Foundation and the generosity of our donors. There will be a number of people recognized today.

Over the last 10 years we've seen some remarkable things occur across the campus. In today's comprehensive environment where schools are involved in major intercollegiate athletics programs, it's critical that the support system for athletics be nationally competitive. That support system includes facilities.

Ten years ago, when Pete Boone became Athletics Director, we were in a situation where we had some work to do with facilities. During that period, (seven of those 10 years, Pete was here to lead the way) we have invested 67 million dollars in athletic facilities. There have been two additions to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. There has been the construction of the Gillom Sports Center. We built a soccer field and stadium. We had the construction of a women's softball field and stadium with more work to be done there. Improvements have been made to the baseball stadium. New seating has been installed in the coliseum. Improvements have been made to the golf course with more improvements to come. The tennis facility gets more fine tuned every year.

With the addition of this magnificent indoor facility, we find that Ole Miss athletes and coaches have the opportunity to practice and play games in state-of-the-art facilities, on the finest fields and courts. They are in a position of being nationally competitive. As we look forward to finding out what is going to happen in athletics at this university and with the university in general, we can move forward knowing that we have provided the infrastructure and facilities that needed to be provided.

To a great extent, the leadership in that area has been provided by Pete Boone. We are much in his debt for his ability to conceive and visualize and find ways to finance that level of construction. Sixty-seven million dollars is a lot of money. With athletics being self supporting, with its revenues coming from ticket sales, conference membership and private support, it's pretty remarkable that you can maintain a 25 to 30 million dollar annual budget and add to that 67 million dollars in capital improvements.

Today I first join all of you in celebrating the ribbon cutting for this wonderful state-of-the-art nationally competitive indoor practice facility. I say to the people who have been involved in creating this, designing it and building it, we are grateful to you for bringing your expertise to this effort. We are most of all grateful to our donors who made this facility possible and will give our athletes a first class place to practice during inclement weather, and as Archie Manning told us so often, to come closer to each other and really get to know one another and spend a lot of time together in a first class environment. We are grateful to George Smith and the Loyalty Foundation for the role that you played and to the university community for embracing this effort and supporting it.

First off, I want to say it's important to have good relationships with every facet of the project. Certainly we thank Aubrey Patterson and Tim Roberts of Bancorp South. We thank the people who got it started, G. G. Ferguson and Associates and his whole group for the magnificent job they did. A few years from now, we will look at this and realize what a great value we have in this building for what we paid and the benefits are student-athletes are going to get.

Of course this couldn't be done without the great work from White Construction Company. We have Guy and Charles White here. They did a magnificent job. It's only fitting that it be raining today. I think we had about three straight months of rain, and they did a wonderful job of keeping things on course. They were great to work with. We certainly could not have done it without Billy Wachter, the project manager. He kept things going on a daily basis and did an excellent job. Donnie Cannada of Butler Snow and Lee Tyner (University Attorney) were instrumental in getting all the (legal) work done. This was a unique thing in that the Loyalty Foundation built this project, but it was university land. There were a lot of hurdles to overcome. There are several other universities trying to do the same thing to expedite their financing of several projects. It's a case where Ole Miss has broken through some barriers to try and get something done in a very efficient way.

Blake Barnes (Associate Athletic Director for Facilities) is our project superintendent here. He maintained a lot of things for me to keep costs down and did a good job of understanding the project and was needed. He did an outstanding job.

We want to thank the people that led the campaign, Dick Scruggs and Archie Manning. They did an excellent job. We have raised about 14 million for this project and have just a little bit to go. We've got some folks that we are going to be calling on in the next few months. We want to thank all of those people involved.

This is a wonderful opportunity that we have in front of us with our football program and our athletics programs in general. I want to thank all the people who spearheaded this project, myself. Certainly, I want to thank my friends at White Construction Company. They've become very close with us throughout this period of time. We appreciate the great pride that they take in their job. We thank all of our supporters that have made this possible. It's phenomenal to see what can occur when people with a common goal get together.

We are able to do two things. There is no question that this enables us to attract the top quality athletes from around the country to come into a quality situation and to provide them with quality facilities. After we get that top quality prospect here and they become one of our own, their development will go through the ceiling. What coach (Ruben) Mendoza and his staff will be able to do with this and what we can do from a practice standpoint, will be great. From the looks of the weather, we may be in here this week. We don't miss a beat with this facility. I can't tell you how much it will impact what we do and who we are. Again, thank you to all the people who spearheaded this project. We appreciate you and God bless.