Duquesne AD Dave Harper envisioned UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse before he set foot on campus

Dave Harper saw UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse long before anyone else on Duquesne’s campus.

In his head, anyway.

Finally, he gets to turn on the lights, open the doors and let others inside. Cooper Fieldhouse will be open for business Tuesday night when the Dukes tip off against Dayton at 9 p.m. Attendance is limited to players’ families and the 50 students lucky enough to win a lottery, but it can been seen on ESPNU.

It’s nothing new to Harper, though.

He saw it when he was Dayton’s vice president of advancement in the summer of 2015 and was being interviewed for the Duquesne athletic director’s job.

He got the job, but he said Monday during a tour of the facility, “I wouldn’t have taken it if they wouldn’t have let me go after money.”

Two years later, he needed a basketball coach, and here comes Akron’s Keith Dambrot for a job interview.

“He knew (Cooper) was coming when I interviewed him,” Harper said. “I had a nice presentation ready for him.”

It’s all part of Duquesne’s commitment to its men’s basketball program that hasn’t earned an invitation to the NCAA Tournament in 44 years.

Cooper Fieldhouse, a $45 million project completed with significant help from donors, is actually a larger version of the former A.J. Palumbo Center, situated on Forbes Avenue in the heart of the Duquesne campus. It houses a new basketball floor, with the signature Duquesne “D” at midcourt, 4,242 seats, luxury suites, a view of the downtown Pittsburgh skyline through sprawling picture windows, a weight room seven times larger than the previous one, practice courts, separate lecture and academic centers where student-athletes can study or get tutored and, of course, concession stands with every amenity.

“P.J. Dick (the contractor) was joking with me,” Harper said. “We may have created the largest bar in Pittsburgh. I said as long as the people are warming their vocal chords and being angry at the other team, we’re fine. As long as they behave appropriately.”

Folino Sports Performance Center, a 10,000-square foot weight room, may be the most important room in the building.

John Henderson, the school’s associate athletic director for sports medicine and performance, called the room a “one-stop-shop” for student-athletes.

Because of the size of the weight room, “We never have to turn them away,” he said. “They can come and train anytime. They come in here, they get their nutrition (including meetings with a dietitian), their sports medicine, their training.

“It’s hard for a college student to eat right. This gives us a tremendous opportunity to provide some stuff to them, but more importantly, to educate our student-athletes on how they should be eating to support their training.”

In the past, Duquesne has moved some of its bigger basketball games to the Civic Arena or PPG Paints Arena. Harper isn’t ruling that out, but he and Dambrot prefer to stay at the Coop where, they hope, the crowds will be “loud and angry.”

“When it gets loud, people aren’t going to want to play here,” Harper said.

The hope is that the new building will create a significant upgrade in exposure for the school and its athletic programs and simultaneously improve recruiting.

Or, as Harper put it last week, “We can shop from some of the higher shelves.”

“We’re going to be the lead story, not the follow-up story,” said Harper, who always is seeking to find a larger niche in the Pittsburgh sports market.

He said the expenditure of funds and 22-month wait while teams were displaced were necessary ingredients toward ultimate success.

“We weren’t going to win with the old building,” he said. “We weren’t.”