Murray State’s board of regents joined athletics staff members Friday to formally break ground on multimillion dollar renovations to the CFSB Center, home to the Racers’ men’s and women’s basketball teams.
Athletic Director Nico Yantko announced the project, the first major renovation to the arena since 1998, in September. Yantko said the planned facility improvements – including the addition of around 1,000 premium seats in the arena, premium loge boxes, a Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) studio and a player development/academic space – is expected to cost between $12 million and $15 million, all funded with private dollars. MSU regents gave the go-ahead Friday for the athletics department to begin the design phase of the project.
Community Financial Services Bank (CFSB), based in far western Kentucky, donated $2 million to Murray State Athletics, which the department announced earlier this week. That donation secured CFSB the naming rights for a first-of-its-kind bunker club, a premium seating option for fans to sit courtside, at the basketball arena and event center nicknamed The Bank.
MSU also held a ceremony dedicating the Leon Owens Winner’s Circle & Performance Center at the CFSB Center in honor of the Board of Regents’ current chair. Swift & Staley, the firm where Owens serves as president, donated $1.5 million to the athletics department earlier this year.
Yantko said the renovations are part of the department’s mission to improve fan experience and recruit student-athletes.
“Vision is expensive, but not nearly as expensive as not having a vision,” Yantko said at the dedication ceremony. “Our commitment is to continue to live in our vision and not our circumstances.”
In addition to approving the naming rights for the CFSB Center Courtside Club, the board of regents signed off on several other naming opportunities.
One of the newly-named facilities honors outgoing MSU President Bob Jackson and his wife, Karen Miller Jackson, a registered nurse. The university’s new nursing and health professions building, which is still under construction, will bear the name of the two Murray State alumni. The current Murray State president is set to retire at the end of June 2025.
Regents were also updated on efforts to establish the Commonwealth’s first veterinary school at Murray State. Jackson said Rep. Mary Beth Imes has filed a bill request ahead of the 2025 session to introduce legislation to establish the program.
Earlier this year, the state legislature requested an independent feasibility study to evaluate four new proposed programs at Kentucky universities, including the MSU veterinary school.
Results from that study were discussed at an Interim Committee on Education meeting earlier this week. That review found that while the far western Kentucky school had built a strong foundation for the new program, there were concerns around the potential school’s model, as well as its potential to impact existing pathways for Kentuckians pursuing a career in animal medicine.
John Laster is a veterinarian with Todd County Animal Clinic who served on the MSU task force regarding the vet school. He said its proposed distributive model – which would see students receive much of their clinical training offsite at private practices, as opposed to at a teaching hospital – could make it difficult to educate students to the level of passing their national board tests.
“In our world, I am a general practitioner,” Laster said at Tuesday’s legislative committee meeting. “I'm a general practitioner with a significant caseload, and I have concern that I do not have time nor training nor skill to instill in my students that would be working with me in a distributed model near the knowledge base and critical thinking skills and clinical skills that can be achieved with a one year clinical teaching program inside a hospital.
“It's a lot cheaper to run a distributed model school than it is a real … full clinical hospital. But I must stress, western Kentucky needs real veterinarians.”
Jackson, along with Assistant Vice President of Public Affairs Jordan Smith and Hutson School of Agriculture Dean Brian Parr, plan to speak at an upcoming interim agriculture committee meeting next week about the veterinary school proposal.
In other Board of Regents business, 12 faculty members from MSU’s biology department attended Friday’s meeting seeking better compensation comparable to other universities and other faculty on campus.
Gary ZeRuth, a Murray State professor in Murray State’s biology department who spoke on behalf of the faculty members, told regents that biology faculty wages at MSU are 20% lower than wages for people in the same roles at comparable universities, and 12% lower than other MSU faculty with comparable rank and years of service in equivalent departments.
ZeRuth said the faculty have been working for more than two years to get raises, and have exhausted all other options before speaking to the Board of Regents. According to the biology professor, the department serves about one-fifth of every incoming freshman class, and ranks fourth in terms of student majors on campus. ZeRuth said the salary levels have hampered the department’s ability to recruit candidates for open positions.
Friday’s meeting can be streamed on YouTube.
Derek Operle contributed to this article.
