Three buildings that were part of athletic facility upgrades at the University of Colorado Boulder have been awarded LEED Platinum status by the United States Green Building Council.
The university says the 212,000-square-foot Champions Center, the 109,000-square-foot Indoor Practice Facility and extensive renovations to the Dal Ward Athletic Center were all included in the Athletic Department project, which was completed in 2016. The latest LEED recognition brings to 25 the number of university buildings certified LEED Gold or better.
“Achieving LEED Platinum for a project of this magnitude is a testament to the work and collaboration of several campus departments and partners,” says CU Boulder Vice Chancellor for Infrastructure and Safety David Kang. “Athletics has been a key driver of campus efforts to be a leader in sustainability.”
Construction of the Champions Center provided a new home for the Athletics administration, the football program, Olympic sports, the Sports Medicine and Performance Center and the Champions Club.
The climate-controlled, net-zero-energy Indoor Practice Facility includes a full football field and a six-lane, 300-meter track that is used by nearly every sports team.
The Dal Ward upgrades included locker rooms and a new weight room for CU Olympic Sports, new spaces for the Herbst Academic Center and the Touchdown Club Room. The Champions Center and Dal Ward construction also included the addition of a pair of premium seating areas at Folsom Field.
The signature sustainability feature of the project is the 850-kilowatt solar array that sits atop the Indoor Practice Facility and boasts an estimated annual production of a little more than 1 million kilowatt hours per year. All of the energy use of the indoor facility—and 28 percent of the overall usage by the Athletics facilities upgrades—is offset by the array.
Other key sustainability features are ample daylighting strategies in the Champions Center and the Indoor Practice Facility, reduced water use through fixture selection, mechanical and lighting systems controls that enable optimization of energy, heating and cooling systems, and a new stormwater detention pond that provides natural filtration of stormwater from the site.
