Overview

The 68,000 square foot Cox-McFerrin Center for Aggie Basketball is the home for both the men's and the women's teams, giving both a state-of-the-art basketball facility directly adjacent to Reed Arena. The facility includes a foyer rotunda entrance, two practice gymnasiums, large locker room facilities, players' lounges, coaches' offices, a weight room, team meeting rooms, a training/medical room, and video rooms, thus giving A&M a showcase for its student-athletes. The facility is home to athletes while on campus providing them practice, training and study areas all in one facility. The practice gyms replicate the playing court in Reed Arena, including using the same type basketball goals, court flooring system, lighting levels and the clear height from the floor to the bottom of the suspended scoreboard system above the court. Amenities include everything for today's student athletes including LCD flat screen TVs wired for multi-media input and gaming systems in all areas of the building utilized by players including player lounges, locker rooms, training rooms and weight room. The foyer rotunda entrance is a transitional space capable of providing a welcoming and exciting entrance to a potential basketball recruits and families while also meeting the needs to use the space for game day activities including hosting of donor and alumni functions. A major key to building the Cox-McFerrin Center for Aggie Basketball was the need to tie this building into the existing Reed Arena. The design response is a three-level addition, with the lowest level (even with the playing floor of the arena) containing training facilities, team locker rooms, coach's locker rooms, and players' lounges allowing quick and easy access to the competition court in Reed Arena. The second level contains two court-and–a–half practice gyms, weight room and weight training coach's offices and mechanical rooms that serve the entire building. The two 12,000 square foot practice gyms feature a maple hardwood court six basketball goals of the same type as used on the Competition Court, a full size NCAA regulation size court and two high school size cross courts. This combination of court sizes and markings allows for a multitude of practice scenarios and tasks to be accomplished by the teams and coaching staffs. A full court practice can occur on the NCAA court while at the same time players can be working on rebounding techniques on one of the cross courts while on the other, players can be working on three-point shooting or free throws. In addition, a sound system allows for coaches to speak to large high school camp groups hosted by the programs and for student athletes to play music while they do individual shoot around including the ability for the players to plug in their own MP3 player or IPod into the system to player their own recorded music. The concourse level of the facility provides offices for both men's and women's teams and the Carolyn and Tommie E. Lohman '59 Grand Lobby. The offices are all equipped with wall mounted flat-panel TVs which can watch a variety of media sources including local programming, national sporting networks, and A&M's own network and can view tapes of previous A&M games or upcoming opponents' previous games. The Lohman Lobby features trophy cases and a maple wood floor to simulate the basketball court wood floor.