Photo Gallery

KU releases drawings of proposed Olympic Sports Village

As part of an athletic certification process, KU on Monday released documents, plans and drawings its accumulated over the past 10 years. Among the documents released were a 2008 plan for an Olympic Sports Village near where the baseball and softball fields are currently located. These photos were in that plan.

Kansas University Athletics Department has a master plan to create a $24.6 million Olympic Village in the area south of Anschutz Pavilion.

The idea includes a 400-meter track and field with grandstand seating, new practice and competition soccer fields with grandstand seating and new grandstand seating for the softball field.

The Athletics Department released a draft of a self study Wednesday detailing information on budgets, master plans and many other aspects of its operation, including the Olympic Village plan.

The study contains hundreds of pages of data and reports on five major areas: governance and rules compliance, academic integrity, gender issues, diversity issues and student-athlete well-being.

Jim Marchiony, an athletic department spokesman, said that fundraising for the new facilities is ongoing, and it’s an important part of what KU Athletics is trying to do in the future.

The report is part of a NCAA requirement for all Division I programs every 10 years, Marchiony said.

“It provides everyone — faculty, staff, students, the general public — a kind of window to athletics and how it’s run,” Marchiony said.

He said the study serves as a report card on how the department is doing.

KU will collect feedback from the public in a session from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. Monday in the Kansas Room of the Kansas Union.

Frank DeSalvo, associate vice provost for student success and chairman of the self study steering committee, will join Chancellor Robert Hemenway, Athletic Director Lew Perkins, law professor Steve McCallister, and Jerry Bailey, director of the Institute for Educational Research and Public Service, in answering questions from the public.

KU will then finalize the report and send it to the NCAA by May 1. The NCAA will review the report and provide an analysis in July, and KU will have until Oct. 12 to respond.

An NCAA peer-review team will visit campus in late October and issue a report to the chancellor by December, and KU will have a chance to respond. The NCAA Certification Committee will then deliberate and issue a final decision by February 2010.