<p><audio controls="" data-able-player="" id="player" preload="auto"><source src="audio-files/UHVLANDGIFT.mp3" type="audio/mp3" /> <track default="" kind="captions" label="English Captions" src="audio-files/uhvlandgift.vtt" srclang="en" /> Your browser does not support the HTML5 audio element.</audio> </p> <p>Lon Gonzalez: 00:00<br /> The University of Houston-Victoria was recently given a gift of 65 acres of land, which will be utilized for expansion of athletics at the university. The gift is the largest donation made in support of UHV athletics.</p> <p>Jesse Pisors: 00:13<br /> We knew we needed land, but we really didn&#39;t know who to go to or how we might sort of get there. And it was actually the Bennett-Wood family, uh, last fall and uh, one of their, realtors Lee Swearingen who came to us in the fall and said this is something that we might want to do for the university. And so we&#39;ve been kind of working through the process of, you know, a transference of land in a donation, has some complexities, but we&#39;ve been working through that for the last several months. And you know, the location of the land is just ideal. It&#39;s only four miles from campus. So it&#39;s very close. It&#39;s flat, it&#39;s near the Victoria airport, it&rsquo;s right on one of the major thoroughfares that goes, goes through Victoria, of course, heading out towards Houston. So it&#39;s an ideal location for us it&rsquo;s the ideal amount of land. It&#39;s enough land really for us to dream as big as we can dream for our NAIA athletics program.</p> <p>Lon Gonzalez: 01:18<br /> That&rsquo;s Jesse Pisors vice president of advancement and external relations at UHV, who says the property will serve purpose for multiple sports activities.</p> <p>Jesse Pisors: 01:27<br /> Well, initially we will we&#39;ll focus on building facilities for the sports we currently have. We have baseball, we have softball, we have men&#39;s and women&#39;s soccer, so we need practice facilities and competition facilities for those sports, but we also have room and are sort of looking in very early exploratory stages of looking at tennis track, you know even potentially lacrosse.</p> <p>Lon Gonzalez: 01:53<br /> Jesse adds that there are no plans for expansion into football, but the property involved for the expansion certainly has the room for it. For the future, there&#39;s the possibility of events like tournaments that will feature both the university&#39;s athletic complex as well as being an economic boom.</p> <p>Jesse Pisors: 02:10<br /> That&#39;s a dream both for the university and for the city because you know, if you bring in a bunch of teams for, as you said, a baseball or softball tournament or soccer tournament or something else, you&#39;re bringing in a lot of hotel revenue, a lot of, uh, you know, spending into the community that&#39;s valuable for Victoria, it just brings notoriety to the university. So this is absolutely something that we want to do both for ourselves and for our city.</p> <p>Lon Gonzalez: 02:40<br /> The 65 acres of property gifted to UHV is valued at around $820,000 and considered a major milestone for the institution.</p>