TEXARKANA MAGAZINE
The new RRCU Athletic Complex on the Texas A&M University-Texarkana campus will feature baseball and softball fields, tennis, pickleball, and sand volleyball courts, seating areas, and locker rooms.
BACK TO THE NEST BY JOHN BUNCH
T hey say there’s no place like home. But for several of the Texas A&M University-Texarkana athletic teams, “home” has been a somewhat relative term. The Eagles tennis, baseball, and softball teams have held their home competitions at other venues across Texarkana, which by default lack much of the excitement and energy of the game day experience on a college campus. The facilities are well-kept and taken care of and have provided a much-needed home location during the early years of the athletic program. However, they were not designed with many of the amenities needed by intercollegiate athletic programs. That is now about to change, as the university has recently unveiled the plans for its new Red River Credit Union (RRCU) Athletic Complex to be constructed on the A&M-Texarkana campus. Officially unveiled at a ceremony in February, the new RRCU Athletic complex will feature home fields for baseball and softball, as well as both indoor and outdoor courts for the university tennis teams. The facility will also be home to the university beach volleyball
teams, which are scheduled to begin competing in the fall of 2024. The new complex will also feature pickleball courts, a hospitality and community engagement suite, a sports performance center, and other amenities. Having the new complex on campus will also mean that the facility has cutting-edge technology installed from an infrastructure standpoint. In this era of college athletics, athletes want to know friends and family back home will see their games. Many of the Eagle athletes come from across the country and around the world, and their families expect to watch games online. The lack of high-speed internet service at some of the current venues makes live streaming a game virtually impossible, and even keeping up with live statistics is a challenge. “Having the RRCU Athletic Complex on campus will give those venues access to state-of-the-art technology,” said Jayson Ferguson, who works in the university’s Information Technology Department. “We’ll have the ability to do everything we need to do with regards to streaming and live statistics.”
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