Auburn, Alabama
Auburn University Woltosz Football Performance Center
233,428 square feet
12 acres
Dedicated solely to Auburn University’s football program, the Woltosz Football Performance Center is the largest athletics project in school history. Covering 12 acres, the facility includes two full-sized natural grass outdoor fields, a 95,300-square-foot indoor practice facility with a full-sized synthetic turf field and the 25,000-square-foot player development lab featuring strength and conditioning equipment and training space.
The complex was designed to be comparable to other football performance centers, but with features to differentiate Auburn from its peers and make it unique to the Tigers’ program.
Designed by GMC and HOK to house day-to-day activities of athletes, coaches and support staff, the facility aims to enhance player recruitment, retention, development and recovery. The 233,428-square-foot complex features a sports performance weight room, locker rooms, team and position meeting rooms, lounge areas and recruiting spaces. The building was intentionally designed to maximize efficiency for athletes by diagramming their typical entry and building usage sequence, as well as training schedule.
The design reimagines the college football locker room with the introduction of two separate but adjacent locker rooms for unique purposes. The “huddle” locker room features 125 lockers for clothes, each with a zero-gravity chair, plus a lounge, barbershop and space for players to relax. The “armory” is a dedicated changing area for players to prepare for practice, with direct access to practice areas, equipment storage, laundry and showers.
The facility also houses the program’s sports medicine and nutrition offices, football administration offices, social media suite, recovery suites, equipment room and laundry. Laboratory and equipment spaces were designed for the implementation and advancement of football technology related to on-field performance, monitoring, sports medicine and equipment inventory, including a remote video command suite with 19 elevated field cameras, perimeter field GPS anchor array for on-field player tracking, full body scanner for on-field performance analysis and equipment customization.
