‘Sew’ing up Huber Center sewer challenge

Image: Coliseum GSVA / Michael Rennschmied

Edward H. Higgins is very humorous and witty by nature. Holding a responsible role with the Vanderbilt University (US) he tells that it is one among the best colleges and universities in the United States.

While building the Huber Center or the basketball practice facility as part of the varsity’s 40,350-capacity FirstBank Stadium they faced huge ‘sewer’ challenges which they overcame.

Edward H. Higgins joined Vanderbilt University in 2014 as the Director of Facilities and Game Operations and currently serves as the Associate Athletic Director for Capital Projects. In addition to those duties Higgins oversees all athletics construction projects.

In an interesting talk with ‘Coliseum’, Edward H. Higgins, Associate Athletic Director, Capital Projects, Vanderbilt University, US, tells that the Huber Center has been so designed that it saves a lot of time for the coaches, the athletes and the staff. Moreover, while finding a solution to the sewer problem which they faced “on this project we did tens of million dollars of work on the City infrastructure. It is something that will never be seen by our fans or our athletes and it was vital to our project.”
 

Vanderbilt University

The Vanderbilt University is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of the shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Edward H. Higgins begins by stating that the Huber Center or the basketball practice facility that “we just built is approximately a 100 million dollar project, 90,000 square feet and we dedicated the building in January 2025. It is a four-story facility and 85 percent of the building houses our two basketball programs and about 15 percent of the front-facing space is for premium seating and football games. It has all the bells and whistles including keeping the athletes happy.”

The practice courts are stacked on top of each other and the building has been so designed keeping the Coaches, athletes and the staffs’ ease in mind and “saving time and steps because we know time is very important”.
 

Sewer Challenge

“One of the big problems we had and it is really a crappy situation because we had to divert an 87-inch combined storm and sewer line that comes from the neighborhood sort of our footprint, through our tennis courts to our baseball stadium, underneath our football stadium and then goes all the way through the footprint of that new building. We had to dig up the old sewer line and then do our project. We had to expose that sewer and build approximately 300 feet of new sewer and then we abandoned 300 feet of existing sewer to be able to build the building. We had to divert the sanitary flow and not stop it in any way as it is supporting thousands of homes and campus buildings and dorm rooms so extremely difficult for us to do that. As we did not want to collapse we built an old school dam system a little bit. That was our solution and it took a lot of time. The lessons learned were it is superimportant for early identification, the value of collaboration among all the shareholders for this specific area of the project and also the others and the need for proactive planning is just vital.”

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