Investing in Athletic Facilities Can Help Build Champions
How important is your athletic facility in the grand scheme of your athletic program? Is the locker room vital to the success of your athletes, or is it enough to have good coaches and talented players? Interestingly, there’s a striking commonality among successful college athletic programs: most of them have a top-notch athletic facility.
How invested are the major players in college athletics when it comes to their facilities? The answer varies, but it can go up to the millions. Cincinnati’s Bearcats call the Varsity Village their home, and it houses all their amenities, from football, basketball and baseball stadiums, to a center for the marching band, to locker rooms, offices, hydrotherapy pods and meeting spaces. The cost for all that? $105 million. Don’t think that kind of expenditure is uncommon, either. Colorado’s facilities are slated to get a $143 million upgrade, Ithaca State, USC and the University of Iowa all provide their teams with facilities that cost between $65 and $70 million. Remember, though, that these facilities foster teams with huge results: USC, for example, brought in $90.5 million in revenue last year. Better facilities bring in better players, who play better games and make more money for your school. These figures may be staggering, but they show that when it comes to success, the top schools know their facilities are just as important as their staff and rosters.
Are those numbers a little out of your budget? You don’t have to spend millions, but there are a few concepts to remember when you’re planning your athletic facility. First, you want a place where athletes can efficiently train and get into the kind of condition that wins games. That’s why the best athletic programs spend money on amenities like weight rooms, meditation rooms, climbing walls, saunas and indoor practice fields. If you want your players to want to hang out in your athletic facility, though, you also want to make it fun and relaxing. You may not be able to afford a leisure pool with a lazy river like the University of Iowa, or a 170 seat movie theater like Oregon State, but you can work within your budget to come up with ways to enhance your athletic facility in a way that will make it more appealing to both existing and future players.
Whether you’re building a college athletic facility, equipping a gym or furnishing a private club, Legacy Lockers has athletic lockers to meet your needs. Providing high quality wooden lockers in a variety of design options, Legacy Lockers is committed to excellence in both workmanship and customer service. For further tips and information, like Legacy Lockers on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or visit the website to learn how to create the perfect locker room for your athletic facility.
