Neal: Anderson Arena will be a game-changer for St. Thomas

Before I could begin this assignment, I needed to arrive at my destination wearing long pants and ditch the open-toed shoes. I also had to sign a waiver because I would be walking around a construction site.

“That’s a little different,” St. Thomas legend Steve Fritz said after I told him the rules of reporting this story. “You could have walked into the third-floor gym anytime.”

Fritz was speaking of the court he played on in O’Shaughnessy Hall in the late 1960s, back when there were just 1,980 undergraduates roaming around St. Thomas and well before anyone had an inkling the Tommies were on a nearly 60-year journey toward becoming a Division I program.

The third-floor gym was nicknamed the “Hot Box” because it had skylights, so when the sun was bright, the gym would heat up.

It was only supposed to hold 500-600 spectators, but a couple of hundred more would squeeze in at times. And fans were on top of the action. Fritz remembers having conversations with opposing fans during breaks in the action in the cozy yet cramped court.

There was a game against St. John’s when St. Thomas players were supposed to bust through a paper banner when they entered the court for pregame warmups, but Johnnies fans beat them to it.

“One of the years, for homecoming, they brought in a professional wrestling group,” Fritz said. “These wrestlers came in, and one was trying to juggle some shot puts, and he dropped one in the lane. After that, there was a dead spot in that lane. They couldn’t fix it very well.

Fritz was a star player, title-winning coach and effective administrator. And the basketball teams during his time went from playing in O’Shaughnessy to Schoenecker Arena I, which opened in 1981, to Schoenecker Arena II, which opened in 2010. He remained on campus until his retirement in spring 2019, watching the school grow to 10,000 students while the sports programs flourished and diversified.

And now, St. Thomas is a Division I college program in all sports.

That brings us to Wednesday, when a signed waiver was required to tour the newest gym — the $183 million Lee and Penny Anderson Arena, which will open this fall and be home to the basketball and hockey programs. The project is about 90% complete, with final details being addressed.

There’s more purple in this joint than at U.S. Bank Stadium. And the painters aren’t done yet.

The arena will seat 5,300 for basketball and 4,000 for hockey. Each team will have its own practice area. The basketball courts will be called the McCarthy Basketball Practice Center, keeping the old McCarthy Gymnasium name alive.

Athletes at “The Andy” will have a weight room and a hydrotherapy room at their disposal. Each team has a lounge area in which to study and relax.

The arena will have a student section on one end. The main seating includes a few rows of balcony seating. There are six suites, club-level seating for 400 and lounges for VIPs.

This arena isn’t cozy yet cramped; it is cozy and contemporary. There’s a chance the place will get really loud when full. Tommies-Gophers meetings will be raucous.

The Lee and Penny Anderson Arena is a game-changer for a booming program. Facilities matter, and the upgrade will make the Tommies a bigger player in recruiting. Women’s hockey coach Bethany Brausen cautioned that it doesn’t guarantee winning, but having new facilities shows what St. Thomas wants to become.

“And certainly, this is part of the recruiting puzzle,” Brausen said. “That when you walk through this space, there’s no stone that is unturned.”

He’ll get to see how far St. Thomas sports, and the school, have come since he arrived on campus in 1967 and played games in a sweltering third-floor gym.