Y. indoor practice facility getting put up in a hurry

They've never seen a construction job on BYU's campus catch fire like this one.

At some construction sites, you see six guys watching one guy with a backhoe, workers taking long lunch hours and knocking off early and foremen sometimes disappearing for huge chunks of the day.

At this Provo site, where soon will stand a $50 million indoor practice facility, athletic administrative offices and training and locker rooms, workers for the Span and Okland construction companies are crawling around like picnic ants.

From early morning until long after the faculty leaves campus, workers hit it on a schedule of 12-hour days six-days a week and half days on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year holidays. Since breaking ground mid-September, this scene's been a hard-hat blur.

Athletic Director Val Hale can't remember a speed deal involving concrete and steel like this one in all his 20 years at BYU. "Building of Larry Miller Field was fast, but not this fast," Hale said.

"I pulled up one morning in the dark at 5:45 and there were guys working under the lights," associate athletic director Duff Tittle said.

Tittle's office window faces the construction site. "I've never seen workers stop out there unless they're sitting down with lunch boxes for a few minutes every day."

Workers have poured nearly 4,000 cubic yards of concrete to date and cranes are expected to fly steel within days. The day weather forecasters predicted the first major snow storm of the season, Dec. 17, Okland workers poured 250 cubic feet of concrete on a deck and smirked at gray skies.

"It's been scary, to tell you the truth," Okland Construction superintendent Dave Kasteler said of weather breaks in this deal. "We are on schedule to get this finished by deadline in October.

"It's as if BYU football is having its way."

Amazingly, until mid-June 2002, the whole thing was still a dream with hopes of getting funded. Once officials decided to go ahead everything from money, permits and coordination fell into place, orchestrated like sheet music.

Okland and Span, the construction heavyweights, would have it no other way. The big bosses, Randy Okland (Salt Lake City) and Span's King Husein (Fresno, Calif.) are used to working fast.