Tallahassee.com: Noles get Ferrari of swimming facilities
From Tallahassee.com:
Concrete steps and steel hand railings lead to the highest point of the new home for the Florida State University swimming and diving teams.
Up here, about 33 feet or 10 meters above everything at the Morcom Aquatic Center, tall trees limit the panoramic view from the highest diving platform at the center.
Here at the center's Pottsdamer Road address, near Lake Bradford Road in southwest Tallahassee, there is only the sky, the trees, the WFSU antennae and the short-game practice green at the Seminole Golf Course.
The hum of the pool machinery, soft chip shots offered up by the occasional golfer and quick shouts from a diving coach sitting on a folding chair are some of the sounds that come with the surroundings on any given day.
More than anything, this $11-million facility, which the FSU teams will use for the first time during the 2008-09 season, punctuates the program's escalating prominence at the national scale.
FSU head swimming and diving coach Neil Harper says he could sense that from the day his swimmers and divers christened the swimming pool and diving well last month.
"When they dived in and swam, they knew they were in a different league," Harper said. "They just knew there was a difference.
"It confirms the athletic department's and university's commitment to providing our student-athletes with one of the best facilities in the country."
Other than perhaps the Georgia Tech pool, the pool used during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Harper considers the new FSU facility the best among Atlantic Coast Conference schools.
