The quality of its facilities can often measure the status of a collegiate athletic department. From the smallest HBCU to the largest Power Conference school, athletic facilities can be a make-or-break asset for a school’s recruiting, student enrollment, and overall fan engagement. Mississippi Valley State University is the latest HBCU athletic department to announce major upgrades to its stadiums, weight rooms, and fields across multiple sports.
A tweet from the Mississippi Valley State University Athletic Department on April 24th teased a bevy of new upgrades coming to the Mississippi HBCU and its nearly 1,900 undergraduate students.
According to the video, fans of MVSU football can expect a new turf football field and jumbotron added to Rice-Totten Stadium at Chuck Prophet Field, the 10,000-seat multi-purpose stadium that opened in 1958 as Magnolia Stadium and was renamed in 2000 in honor of former Mississippi Valley State football players Jerry Rice and Willie Totten, who set several NCAA Division I-AA records during their time in Itta Bena, MS in the 1980s.
In addition to the football upgrades, MVSU announced the resurfacing of its tennis courts, new signage, and school-colored metal panels for the Baseball/Softball pavilion. The Baseball/Softball pavilion will also get a roof overhang for rain protection, open-end bays for ventilation, and chainlink panels with vinyl baseball windscreen.
The video also showed a 360-degree rendering of the upcoming upgrades to the pavilion. Also included in the video was a rendering of new basketball/volleyball media rooms and an IRL photo of a new weight room that has already been completed.
The MVSU basketball and Volleyball programs operate out of the R.W. Harrison HPER Complex, a 5,000-seat multi-purpose arena in Itta Bena, Mississippi. Constructed in 1977, the complex went through $17.5 million worth of upgrades in 2016.
The post reads “As we continue to elevate, here are facility updates to be finished by the end of 2024” indicating that the weight room is complete, the jumbotron is “almost complete” and the upgrades for the football turf and Baseball/Softball pavilion will be “completed in 2024,” while the tennis courts are listed as “almost done.”
Mississippi Valley State athletics programs are looking to turn things around in terms of success on the field of play and these athletic facility upgrades could be the boost the school needs to get back on the winning track.
According to the championships page on the Mississippi Valley State website, the football team has never won a SWAC conference championship and its last trip to the NCAA playoffs was back in 1984 during the Rice-Totten era.
Valley’s men’s and women’s basketball teams haven’t won the SWAC since 2012, and its tennis, baseball, and volleyball squads are still looking for their first conference championships on record.