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The long-awaited day has come: The Florida Gators are practicing in their brand new indoor practice facility.
We are now officially ready for some football. #GoGators #IPF #nolightening pic.twitter.com/WDd5JM5baN
— Chip Howard (@Chip_Howard) August 22, 2015
#Gators now practicing in the indoor facility. Follow them on Snapchat (username: chompchat) - pic.twitter.com/IjUQm8PjyE
— Thomas Goldkamp (@ThomasGoldkamp) August 22, 2015
And, right on cue, it started raining in Gainesville... pic.twitter.com/qQysc9Z6HL
— Thomas Goldkamp (@ThomasGoldkamp) August 22, 2015
Today's forecast? 100% chance of practice. #IPF #GoGators pic.twitter.com/yjRyFwXCo8
— Gators Football (@GatorsFB) August 22, 2015
Put aside a Florida associate athletic director not knowing how to spell lightning, and that's pretty cool.
Also: Goldkamp is dead-on about it raining in Gainesville. Here's the radar from 3:45 p.m. Saturday, via Weather.com:
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This is absolutely the primary benefit of having an indoor facility — being able to practice on a day when inclement weather would otherwise scrub outdoor activities. That Florida gets to enjoy it on the first day it heads inside The Shed That Mac Had Built is a delicious bit of "See? Told you so."
It's also testament to just how quickly a project like this can get done: Florida officially announced the plans to build the facility on January 21, seven months and a day ago, with crews breaking ground on that day.
A full-fledged indoor practice facility that took just over 200 days to erect is some kind of feat for Florida and its construction partners.