UK's new baseball stadium is "topped out"

On Thursday, the Kentucky Baseball program held a “topping-out” ceremony to celebrate a milestone moment in the construction of the new stadium, which is on schedule to be completed in late Summer/early fall of 2018.

The “topping-out” ceremony is a long-standing tradition in the construction of large structures that signifies the milestone of putting into place the last and/or highest piece of steel in the project. The ceremony has Scandinavian roots and typically involves a flag and tree being attached to the steel beam. Members of the University of Kentucky baseball team, coaching and support staffs, as well as season ticket holders signed the beam that will be incorporated into the stadium structure.

UK head coach Nick Mingione says the stadium is bigger than he originally thought.

"It's one thing to look at it on paper, right? It's another thing to do the virtual tour of it and it's a whole 'nother thing to put your feet inside of it. So the fact that we've been able to do that now and walk through it, it's way bigger than I would've ever imagined. Just walking through our team room, our locker room, the batting cages, the pitching mounds, it's really amazing."

UK will play at Cliff Hagan for the 2018 campaign and then move into the new stadium in the fall of next year.