Virginia Tech Athletics unveiled a monument celebrating Coach Beamer at Moody Plaza during a pregame ceremony on Saturday. The National Football Foundation also conducted an on-field salute of Coach Beamer, as he accepted a plaque that commemorates his selection to the College Football Hall of Fame’s Class of 2018.
Signage was also officially displayed on the facade of the newly named Beamer-Lawson Indoor Practice Facility. The award-winning has been recognized as one of the nation’s finest multi-purpose training facilities in college and professional athletics.
This naming honors the Beamer family, as well as a significant leadership gift from the John Lawson family that helped make this vision a reality. This halftime ceremony recognized the significant contributions that both families have made to Virginia Tech and specifically this project which was funded along with the assistance of many generous Tech benefactors. John and Paige Lawson were also recognized in the midfield ceremony along with Frank and Cheryl Beamer, complete with a salute from Skipper.
“We have respected and admired the Beamer family for over 30 years,” Lawson said. “The fact that we were able to help Frank, Cheryl and so many others make this dream become a reality is one of my family’s proudest lifetime achievements.”
A 1975 geophysics alumnus of Virginia Tech, Lawson is the executive chairman of W. M. Jordan Company. He serves on a number of boards, including past chairman and current board member for Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters and The Mariners’ Museum. He was co-chair of Virginia Tech’s $1 billion comprehensive campaign, a past Rector for the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors and co-founder of the Meyers-Lawson School of Construction Management at Virginia Tech.
Opened in Coach Beamer’s final season in 2015, the project was conceived as a facility that would not only benefit football, but would also be available to many other of Tech’s teams and the Virginia Tech community. Designed and constructed under the direction of the W. M. Jordan Company, the building features eight distinctive porticoes engraved with the same values on the eight pylons of Virginia Tech’s War Memorial – Brotherhood, Honor, Leadership, Sacrifice, Service, Loyalty, Duty and Ut Prosim.
The expansive structure can hold a volume of over 7.9 million cubic square feet and has a height over 86 feet from the field to the interior roof trusses, a feature specially requested by Coach Beamer to allow for punting and kicking.
The facility has received multiple awards from the Design-Build Institute of America’s Mid-Atlantic Region, an organization that teaches and promotes the best practices in design-build construction. Most notably, the Beamer-Lawson Indoor Practice Facility received a first-place award for building design. Along with HKS Sports + Entertainment, the W.M. Jordan Company also received the Excellence in Architecture Award for the project.