Matt Meltzer: To get Penn up to par, think inside the bubble

Here's a revelation: It gets cold in Philadelphia over the winter. No, not Hanover, N.H. cold or Ithaca, N.Y. cold, but it can be pretty nippy out there. So when the weather heads south of the freezing point, athletic practices move indoors. This is where Penn's athletes get the short end, since the school lacks appropriate indoor facilities. But there are solutions to be found. Penn is the only Ivy school without an indoor athletic facility to accommodate varsity teams during the winter, since Meiklejohn Stadium and Franklin Field are both exposed to the elements. Perhaps practicing in the cold makes teams stronger (or more likely to catch pneumonia), but the Quakers have never been a force during the spring sports season and their practice location before the season begins may be at the heart of the issue. First, an indoor training facility may make for better conditioning and practices. If I was a prospective Penn athlete, facilities would be an issue to me. I would love to play on Franklin Field but I would not want to practice inside the poorly located Hollenback Annex - which straddles South Street and the Schuylkill - come February 1. Instead I might be drawn to Coxe Cage at Yale, the famed Jadwin Gymnasium at Princeton or Leverone Field House at Dartmouth. All of these facilities feature an indoor track and surfaces for other teams to practice on. The administration has recognized the problem and has proposed to build a new field house behind the Palestra, where the Levy Tennis Pavilion currently is. The Campus Development Plan calls for the following elements in the field house: "a 50-meter pool, 200-meter track, gymnastics area, indoor tennis courts, squash courts, crew tanks, basketball and volleyball courts and supporting locker and office space." But it may be decades before such a structure is built, and hundreds of athletes will have graduated from the school by then. (I wanted to know the specifics, but facilities employees and campus planners did not return my calls.) So Penn should follow Harvard's lead and build a removable air-bubble on Franklin Field. Last year Harvard added such a bubble to Harvard Stadium during the winter months because it also lacks a permanent field house. Such a facility would be an incredible, not to mention really cool-looking, addition to campus. A bubble is both economically feasible and desirable. Steve McGrath at Air Structure American Technologies, Inc., which built Harvard's new bubble, estimated that a structure to cover Franklin Field would range between eight and ten dollars per square foot, depending on style and material. If a bubble covered the length and width of the field it would cost between $460,000 and $576,000, plus installation and maintenance costs. I am not saying this is cheap, but what an addition it would be to the University. A bubble would not only benefit spring athletes, but students could play intramurals other than hoops and badminton over the winter, plus they could continue to exercise on Sprintturf without risking frostbite. A field house will be great when it is built, but who knows when that will be. Until that day, the University and athletic department should consider an immediate solution: a Franklin Bubble.

Matt Meltzer is a senior Political Science major from Glen Rock, N.J. His e-mail address is meltzerm@sas.upenn.edu.

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