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Gophers associate athletic director of facilities Scott Ellison said construction on the $166 million Athletes Village is on schedule and on budget nine months into the project.

"Everything is coming up out of the ground slowly now," Ellison said. "We've got the footings going in and pretty soon we'll start to see some steel and some structure going up. By November we should have our Center for Excellence pretty much framed in by then, so it should be pretty exciting."

The investment will help put the Gophers' facilities on par or ahead of their competition in the Big Ten, Ellison added. The athletic department released new renderings of the project on Tuesday.

"We're going to have one of the best complexes around for student-athlete development," he said.

The project is scheduled to be completed in 2018. Check out the progress in our video tour.