The late-February 2015 newspaper article was brought to his attention a day after he attended the Rutgers men’s basketball blowout loss to Indiana at the RAC. A season ticket holder for Scarlet Knights men’s basketball games for nearly two decades, Ray Lesniak knew the team was in desperate need of improved facilities in order to make the team more competitive in the Big Ten.
And as one of New Jersey’s longest-termed state senators, Lesniak knew he both had the voice — and ability to rally support in Trenton — to make a statement.
So that’s what he did one day after reading a report that illustrated Rutgers’ struggle to upgrade its basketball facility, Lesniak wrote a letter to university President Robert Barchi that said, “It’s time for Rutgers to step up in class. We’re in the Big Ten. We should act like it.’’
“I think that was the turning point to be honest,’’ Lesniak said Thursday, hours before Rutgers opened the RWJBarnabas Health Athletic Performance Center, a $115 million facility that, among other things, features the men’s basketball team’s long-desired practice court.
“Let me first say that Barchi did a complete 180. So he deserves a ton of credit,’’ Lesniak said. “But when I wrote that letter and the headline was, ‘Lesniak to Barchi: Act like you’re in the Big Ten,’ that was a game-changer,’’ he said.
Reflecting on Lesniak’s criticism in an interview Thursday, Barchi said it comes with the territory of being the president of a school with 70,000 students, 20,000 faculty members and countless fans.
“Look, we knew what we needed to do when we made the decision to go to the Big Ten,’’ Barchi told NJ Advance Media. “The noise came from a relatively small amount of people. They have the ear of a lot of amplifiers, whether it’s the press or the legislature, so you hear that noise. But when you’re standing behind the scenes where I get to see it, you see the whole picture and you don’t get distracted by that. You can’t just write a blank check. You have to have business plan, and you have to know what the return on your investment is. I think in terms of athletics, we had a business plan. People didn’t like to pay attention to it. But we knew what we were doing, and I think we’ve been able to accomplish that.’’
Rutgers unveiled that accomplishment Thursday, welcoming a group of donors, university officials, fans and media members to tour its RWJBarnabas Health Athletic Performance Center during a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“(Rutgers basketball coach) Steve Pikiell took me on a tour last week,’’ said Lesniak, who commissioned an independent report in May 2015 that called on Rutgers to invest in a $50 million to $100 million upgrade to its athletics facilities. “I said, ‘Wow. This is a Big Ten facility.’ This is a huge first step. Without this, we were doomed for failure.’’
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It was a decade-long process that went through multiple designs and got put on the back burner several times following multiple changes in leadership. In May 2012, then-Rutgers AD Tim Pernetti hired the Michael Graves & Associates architectural firm with the intent to build a practice court and upgrade the basketball arena’s look. Not long after Pernetti’s ouster, Julie Hermann in December 2013 spoke of a concept loosely called “Athletes Village,” which was expected to include a new basketball practice facility adjacent to the Rutgers football stadium.
But in June 2015, following months of scrutiny from Lesniak and pressure from the Rutgers fanbase, Barchi unveiled a concept that called for a multi-use practice facility in the 327-page Rutgers 2030 physical master plan.
“It’s a blueprint that’s flexible that we can work with,” Barchi said at the time.
Five months later, Hobbs replaced Hermann as Rutgers’ AD. He then took the concept introduced by Barchi from the 50-yard line to the end zone.
“When I arrived here, I actually didn’t know the true conditions of the facilities,’’ Hobbs said. “And when I did it became quickly apparent what my focus had to be.’’
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Months before Hobbs’ arrival, Lesniak sponsored legislation that would enable Rutgers to make use of up to $25 million in tax credits to finance the construction of modern athletic facilities. The bill, co-sponsored by Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr., (R-Union), sailed through the upper house of the New Jersey Legislature in June and advanced with a companion bill by a wide margin in the state Assembly six months later.
“It was brought to my attention that Sen. Lesniak had sponsored this legislation and, I guess, it was just sitting there,’’ Hobbs said. “So I appealed to Gov. Christie and I stressed the importance of this and, to his credit, Gov. Christie said, ‘Absolutely, I’m going to support this.’ And in that moment, when he signed the grant of $25 million in late January 2016 that literally became the moment when we launched the Big Ten Build (on Jan. 20, 2016).’’
Hobbs and his team of fundraisers went to work securing both big gifts and small ones, raising nearly $60 million from 4,100 donors in the recently completed $100 million fundraising campaign.
But the moment that, Hobbs said, transformed Rutgers athletics didn’t come until November 2017 when Rutgers announced both an $18 million investment from RWJBarnabas Health. Not coincidentally, Hobbs scheduled a groundbreaking that same week.
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Barry Ostrowsky, the President/CEO of RWJBarnabas Health, worked with Hobbs on the deal. A 1972 Rutgers graduate, Ostrowsky wears his Scarlet colors proudly five decades after competing in the hammer throw with the track and field team.
“I was here a long time ago as an athlete and we had very little in terms of facilities and very little attention,’’ Ostrowsky said. “For my first indoor track meet as a freshman, we actually changed in the bus going up to West Point.’’
Long before he was the Rutgers AD, Hobbs had a relationship with Ostrowsky, serving together on a board at Newark-Beth Israel.
“During the conceptual design phase, we talked about the importance of sports medicine,’’ Hobbs said. “I’ve known Barry for a long time. I made an appointment to see Barry in the spring of 2016 and said to him, ‘We have an opportunity to build best-in-class. I know what you want to do with RWJBarnabas is help in sports medicine, and here’s what I want to do. And I think there’s an opportunity in a facility to marry those two visions.’ ‘’
Ostrowsky remembers the appointment well.
“It was an informal, very casual conversation,’’ he said. “I said, ‘Pat, what vision do you have?’ He’s an articulate speaker, and he gave me the vision. I said, ‘How can we help?’ He said, ‘This is what we’d like to do,’ and frankly on the spot I knew we were going to do it. I didn’t tell him that, though.’’
He made Hobbs sweat it out a few days.
“Barry asked ‘What’s it going to take?’ and then said, ‘That’s a big number and we’ll have to take that back to our board,’ ‘’ Hobbs said.
Ostrowsky recalled using his persuasive powers to convince the board to make an $18 million investment that, thanks to an additional marketing component, could net Rutgers an additional $8 million over the next decade and bring the total value to the deal at $26 million.
“I knew we were going to do it, so I met with my colleagues and explained why I thought it would be a good project,’’ he said. “When you have the corner office, they tend to agree with you. Everybody said that would be great, and I called Pat and said, ‘We have a deal.’ Typically it usually takes a lot of cultivation; it didn’t because this spoke for itself. The leadership here at Rutgers has been great; Pat has been a big part of that. I go back a long time with Rutgers, and it hasn’t always been like that. But it absolutely is now and this to me is simply emblematic of the quality of the development (team) for the university.’’
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Thirty months after hammering out the deal, Rutgers unveiled a 307,000-square-foot, four-story sports facility that serves as the headquarters for a RWJBarnabas Health sports medicine program and provides practice facilities, training areas, locker room and office space for the gymnastics, wrestling and men’s and women’s basketball teams.
“When I saw the concept of what they wanted to build in the plans, I couldn’t really picture it. But when I walked through here when it was completed, it actually took my breath away,’’ Ostrowsky said. “I happen to believe that Rutgers University is truly a world-class organization. And everything it does, certainly since Bob (Barchi) has been President, aspires to be world-class. This had to be like that. All we did was help with the healthcare and obviously some of the funding. But the people who built this, who paid attention to the details, who understood how you could support athletes, that’s what’s made this terrific. And I think they’ve exceeded everybody’s expectations.’’
Standing in the lobby as dozens of top donors sipped champagne around him, Barchi was equally proud of a partnership between Rutgers, RWJBarnabas Health, New Jersey’s political system and the school’s fanbase.
“I think with all the naysayers around the university, and all the complaints about where the money goes and what it does to everybody else, we put a challenge on the table that athletics had to come up with the resources to build these great facilities,” Barchi said. “And they have succeeded in doing that. We have world-class facilities — this facility, the practice fields, the academic center going up — and it’s all being done because of the fundraising and the friends and partners that Rutgers Athletics has brought to the table.”
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Keith Sargeant may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @KSargeantNJ. Find NJ.com Rutgers Football on Facebook.
