The Bob Devaney Sports Center is a sports complex on the campus of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska that includes a 13,595-seat multi-purpose arena, a 1,000-seat covered 25-yard swimming and diving facility (Devaney Center Natatorium) and a 5,000-seat covered track and field (athletics) facility (Devaney Sports Center Indoor Track) that features a 200-meter hydraulic-banked track, one of only 3 in the United States and 7 in the world. The arena opened in 1976 and is named after former Nebraska football coach and athletic director Bob Devaney. It is home to the Cornhuskers basketball, gymnastics, indoor track and field and swimming and diving teams. The building replaced the Nebraska Coliseum, the current home of the volleyball and wrestling teams.
It hosted the 1980, 1984 and 1988 men's NCAA basketball tournament Midwest first- and second-round games, and the 1993 women's NCAA tournament first round. In the arena's first thirty years, the men's basketball team has never had a losing home schedule.
Pinnacle Bank Arena, a new arena presently under construction in the Haymarket district, will replace the Bob Devaney Sports Center for the basketball teams in the fall of 2013.
The Bob Devaney Sports Center actually opened in March of 1976 when it was used for the Nebraska Boys State Basketball Tournament. The Nebraska Cornhuskers decided to wait to the beginning of the next season because they wanted the home advantage of the old Coliseum.
Famous quotes containing the words sports and/or center:
“Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)
“Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)