Heavener Football Training Center reaches new milestone
Ben Hill Griffin Stadium is one of the most iconic football stadiums in the country and, soon the rest of Florida's football facilities will match the prestige and bring them to the forefront of college athletics.
Tuesday afternoon Florida held a "topping out" ceremony, where the last structural beam was signed and placed above what will be the entrance to Florida's new stand alone athletic facility.
The new facility sits on the site where McKethan Stadium used to reside. It will have direct access to the football indoor practice facility and the Sanders practice fields. Dan Mullen was a key member of the design team, with accessibility and the players in mind.
The building is designed where players have the easiest access to the training room and nutrition on the way out of the building, to make sure players are hydrated and fed before and after practice. There will be direct access from the locker room to the practice facility and a slick sliding glass door that leads directly from the new weight room right into the indoor facility.
When you have architects and design firms working on a project they're concerned with the aesthetics. Mullen made sure to let them know that the people who will be in the building on a day-to-day basis might need different, potentially less aesthetically pleasing, accommodations.
“I have 100 guys in a meeting room that aren’t normal human beings," Mullen said with a laugh. "Our guys are probably not normal human beings, so when you design a hallway or you design a door or you put a chair in … and (the architects) are like, ‘Oh.’ I say is max capacity like 450 pounds and they’re like, ‘Excuse me?’ We have big guys here. Our guys are a little bit thicker a little bit wider than most people.
Mullen even got involved in the details about chairs in meeting rooms. One plan called for rows of 40 chairs ascending up in a stadium seating fashion. Mullen brought in Ethan White (346 lbs), Stewart Reese (354 lbs), and Desmond Watson (432 lbs) to sit in the chairs and test them out, but also to show the design team the sheer size of the people that will be using the space.
“You can look at the space of the room that could (normally) sit 40 seats across," Mullen said. "But this is the size the chairs need to be, so that won’t fit 40 seats across, so where are adjustments being made? When you’re in architectural design you’re not thinking about 6-foot-5, 350-pound guys as being the normal person walking around."
It's not just for football
Florida football had fallen behind in the facilities arms race. Pictures of Alabama's locker room with a barbershop and waterfalls made the rounds years ago. Clemson added mini-golf and a slide in their football facility, while Florida was crammed inside their stadium.
Functionality was the main goal, but the facility is more than just a place to work out and practice. Players will spend a lot of time in the building and Mullen wanted to make sure it was a place they wanted to be more so than one where they had to be.
Additionally, the space will have football-only areas, such as the locker room and meeting rooms but the new facility is meant for all student-athletes at the University of Florida, something unique to UF.
"I think what makes Florida so special is that bond of the student-athletes. I know a massive contributor to the 2006 National Championship football team was the 2006 men's basketball team. The motivation I think that that drove the players and the interaction that they had, I think that motivates," Mullen said. "So when you look at those things and when you think about those things, that was always my vision of, if we're going to create this massive amenity area that has all these great things, I want all of our student-athletes to be able to utilize that."
The Heavener Center will have a recording studio, virtual reality gaming center, golf simulator, as well as pools, a basketball court and ample room for other activities outside.
Mullen also promises that the new football locker room will be one of, if not the, best in the country.
"One of the big ones, was to design that for all sports to create great student-athlete interaction so that our players can be around Olympians and world record holders and national champions and they can all interact and grow and learn from each other," he said. "Then our locker room for the football players, alone, the locker room will probably be one of the biggest wow factors. It’s going to be the premier locker room in probably all of sports at any level.”
The timeline to move into the James W. “Bill” Heavener Football Training Center has been delayed, something understandable given the circumstances of 2020. Florida had originally hoped to open the building in January 2022 but construction won't be completed by then. The new target date is to have the building completed and ready to be used in May 2022.
Notes and specs about the new facility
The 5 pools at the facility combined hold 90,000 gallons of water
There were 50,000 man-hours worked leading up to the topping out
The facility is just under 142,000 SF overall, which is nearly the equivalent of 3 football fields.
The project contains 4,400 cubic yards of concrete
The project includes a 30,000 SF outdoor amenity area featuring a half-size basketball court, 3,000 SF (65,000 gal) leisure pool, and 3,500 SF amenity lawn.
The project features a 13,000 SF football weight room or two and a half endzones worth of training space.
There were 70 days total between the first steel being set and the topping out (March 30 – June 8).
