In April 2017, the Board of Governors approved GamePlan, UBC’s athletics and recreation facilities strategy. The strategy is a broad set of proposals to address the needs of the UBC community as determined through consultative processes earlier this year.
“The Board of Governors approved the overall strategy that indicates the needs and provides a framework for locations and options in terms of how this needs to be delivered. They’re still relatively broad, but they’re in two major categories,” said Kavie Toor, the UBC Athletics and Recreation director of facilities and business development.
“One component is that there would be a newly constructed stadium that would be rebuilt in the Stadium Neighbourhood area in addition to increased housing. The other component of the project explores a reimagined War Memorial gymnasium with a new recreation centre on the site of the existing War Gym as a combined facility potentially with the kinesiology component to it.”
The strategy’s approval is only the first step. From this point, the many proposals in the GamePlan will be narrowed down to individual capital projects.
Depending on the approval of the individual capital projects, Toor estimates that the GamePlan projects will be completed in a range of anywhere from 3 to 10 years.
“Of course we would love to see the construction start sooner rather than later because there’s significant interest and needs, especially on the student recreation side of it, but we need to go through the process before we hone in on the exact date range,” said Toor.
As next steps, the funding options for the individual capital projects, summaries of the previous phases of consultations and a scope of the Stadium Road Neighbourhood plan process will be presented at the Board of Governors meeting in June.