Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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8 JUNE/JULY 2024 BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED BY TYLER HORKA T he wait for an expansion to Notre Dame's football facilities will soon be over. The Fighting Irish hosted a ground- breaking ceremony April 20, just a couple hours prior to kickoff of the an- nual Blue-Gold Game, for what will be called the Jack and Kathy Shields Family Hall. The new building, which will work in conjunction with the Guglielmino Athletics Complex and is set to increase Notre Dame football's operating space by nearly 50 percent, is scheduled to open in the fall of 2026, per a university press release. "This building will be yet another testament to the support of our foot- ball program, solidifying that we have the top game-day facility [Notre Dame Stadium], a best-in-class indoor fa- cility [Irish Athletics Center] and now a brand-new operations center [Jack and Kathy Shields Family Hall]," Notre Dame athletics director Pete Bevacqua said in a statement. "Furthermore, this undertaking allows us to continue our effort to be the most advanced sports performance unit in college athletics with an addition of more than 80,000 square feet dedicated to the success of our student-athletes through the reno- vation of the Gug." S p a c e h a d go t te n t i g h t i n t h e 96,000-square-foot Gug, which was built not too far northeast of Notre Dame Stadium in 2005. When Blue & Gold Illustrated asked then-Notre Dame athletics director Jack Swarbrick and head coach Marcus Freeman what the main concern with the current state of football facilities was last summer, they both said the size of the Gug. That won't be an issue any longer. The Jack and Kathy Shields Family Hall is labeled a "football support facil- ity" by the university's release. It will be located along Courtney Lane on the east side of campus and is named after Shields Health Solutions founder and chairman Jack Shields, a 1983 graduate of Notre Dame. The new hall will bring Notre Dame football facility accommo- dations to 150,000 square feet. Shields, who partnered with Pat and UNDER THE DOME BREAKING GROUND Notre Dame football will have a new support facility, the Jack and Kathy Shields Family Hall, by the fall of 2026 The Jack and Kathy Shields Family Hall will feature "an advanced training room, a stand-alone sports medicine facility, an equipment facility with body scanning and fabrication technology, a new and expanded locker room, meeting rooms, including a two-level, all-team auditorium and an augmented reality walkthrough room, media innovation spaces, including recording studios and photo studios, academic support spaces and a new player nutrition area designed to foster community between teams and model healthy eating." ARTIST RENDERING COURTESY NOTRE DAME