CINCINNATI — When Larry Sheakley takes in the new $134 million practice and training facility that now officially bears his family name, he sees more than a sleek state-of-the-art structure. He sees the 2010 Sugar Bowl, and a season in which the Cincinnati Bearcats were a second away from reaching the national championship game. He sees the run to the 2021 Cotton Bowl and four-team College Football Playoff. He sees a lifetime spent rooting for Bearcats athletics and how far the football program has come.
“I’ve been a fan my whole life,” said Sheakley, 74. “And when you look back at the last 20 years, we’ve played in the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Peach Bowl and then the Cotton Bowl the year we made it to the Playoff. That’s incredible compared to where we were.”
It’s why Sheakley and his wife, Rhonda, invested so much into this new facility, which is on schedule to be fully open and operational at the end of May. The University of Cincinnati board of trustees recently voted to approve the official name: the Sheakley Indoor Practice Facility and Sheakley Athletics Performance Center.
“From a legacy standpoint, it’s not about the checks that we wrote, but the time and energy we put into making sure we’re doing things the right way,” Sheakley said….
