Five months after moving in to Purdue’s new Football Performance Complex, the massive facility feels like home.
Easy to see why.
The three-level 112,000 square foot structure provides the Boilermakers with a user-friendly experience, from its coaching offices and staff meeting areas on the third level to the team lounge and team meeting areas on the second to the operational floor plan on the first, where the locker room flows into the training room and into the weight room, with the Mollenkopf indoor field adjacent to all three.
“You can walk outside (the locker room) and get on the elevator and go watch film,” said quarterback David Blough, who with linebacker Markus Bailey helped host media on a tour through the expansive facility on Thursday afternoon, the first extensive look inside since the building opened in August. “Everything happens so quickly, you don’t have to worry about walking outside, what shoes you need, is it cold outside?
“You can walk around here and it’s like home. You’re hanging out with the guys, you can talk across the locker room. People dance in here after wins. It makes it a lot of fun, where guys can run around and jump around and have a good time in here.”
In of itself, the locker room experience is impressive, from the square footage (11,600) to the detail. Blough pointed out the plate on the inside of the door to locker No. 15, where former players who wore that number, like Drew Brees and Shaun Phillips, have their names etched.
“It’s pretty special,” Blough said.
Purdue took over the new building, a $65-million facility that sits between the outdoor practice fields and Mollenkopf, after the first week of training camp in August. And immediately, they were enamored with their new digs. Perhaps it helped lead to a resurgence, far sooner than many would have predicted, in 2017. Purdue won seven games, including the Foster Farms Bowl over Arizona, and that victory was certainly evident inside the facility, with the game playing on a loop on every television set.
Maybe the building's ease of use had an affect. On the second level, the Boilermakers can move freely from the locker room into the training room, where they'd head before a workout, either practice or in the weight room.
“We have always have medical care in one place,” said Ryan Collins, Purdue's associate director of sports medicine. “So if they have a cold to an ankle sprain to you name it, they come here first. It’s a one-stop shop for them.
“… It’s very centrally located for all our athletes medical needs.
“There’s a lot of time, you’ll see me do spillover rehab in the strength and conditioning and I also like to do functional training out on the turf, so this room makes it very conductive to rehab. … I have all the machines I need to take them from one phase (of rehab) to another.”
Justin Lovett, Purdue football's director of strength and conditioning, feels the same about his weight room. There, he can maximize players' time, helped by the versatility of equipment and space, nearly 21,000 square feet, to get work done.
“This allows the strength coach to not have to run across the room to do a specific exercise,” he said. “Everything he needs can be compartmentalized right here. He can make as diverse programming as he wants and be efficient, because we only have an hour with them, an hour, 15, we we have to roll. We’re not going to keep them two hours and try to transform the rack, we can do whatever we want and it’s awesome.”
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