Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM SEPT. 12, 2026 17 massage chairs with specific settings, exercise bikes, treatment tables, hot tubs, cold tubs, aqua-treadmills and everything players need to get and stay healthy. Players have the option to un- dergo infrared light therapy, cryother- apy, hydromassages and more. Notre Dame now has a space where it can utilize its rapidly expanding sports performance staff and technology to, as Freeman would say, its full potential. "Whether it's float tanks and light therapy and massage chairs and tracking GPS and a location to do different test- ings to create the individual development plans that our sports performance staff works so tirelessly on," Powlus said. "We just didn't have those in the Gug that we will have space for those and opportunity for those in Shields Hall." Senior linebacker Drayk Bowen be- lieves the new recovery equipment can directly impact how quickly Notre Dame players return from injuries dur- ing the season. "As I've gotten older, I've realized how much more wear and tear you get on the body throughout football season," Bowen said. "All the things that they have now that we can use to get back to 100% a lot sooner, I think that's probably going to be the biggest thing for us and for our team." The brand-new weight room has ev- erything strength coach Loren Landow could possibly need to do his job, in- cluding a strip of turf that runs through the middle for one of his specialties: speed training. Landow also helped de- sign a speed ramp in the weight room, built on exactly the angle he wanted to maximize it. Perhaps the single biggest reason to build a new football operations build- ing, though, was the Patrick Kramer Dining Hall. In it, Notre Dame can pre- pare food for players on site. For years, Notre Dame had to cater outside food to fuel its players. The job of its nutrition staff often involved driv- ing to Jimmy John's, picking up a truck- load of sandwiches and driving back. That was one area where the Irish had fallen behind their championship peers. "We're wheeling in food into the main lobby, past our Heisman trophies," Pow- lus said, laughing. "It's just not an ap- propriate setup for the long term. While we had the opportunity to have food in the Gug, it wasn't being prepared here. It wasn't being tended to in the same way." At Shields, Notre Dame's campus din- ing staff will prepare food for its football players (and, it's worth noting, the rest of its athletes) on a regular basis. Typically that is more nutritious and it also tastes better. It also will free up more time for the dietitians on staff to do their actual jobs, which include crafting diet plans for each individual player. "The food is a huge one," Bowen said. "It's a huge win." SERVING THE PLAYERS Notre Dame's new practice locker room — and don't underestimate the amount of time the team spends there — is a player's dream. State-of-the-art couches are avail- able to sink into after a long day's work. In the adjacent players lounge, there's a Ping-Pong table that sits on even more artificial turf. There's even an in-house barbershop, which Julio Rodriguez — the team barber and owner of Exclusive Studios in Mishawaka — will use to cut players' hair on site. Freeman did not downplay that when asked about it at the Aug. 25 press conference. "Half of me wants to say, 'Are we talk- ing about football right now?'" Freeman said. "But that means something to our players. Maybe me a little bit. Young players want their haircut, and there's an image they want to show." Freeman stressed when Shields Hall was first announced as a project that while the new facility could help lure recruits or serve as a museum for fans, every decision the Irish made had to be about serving their players. And that's certainly what they did, not only to im- prove their performance but to make their lives more enjoyable. "We use up a lot of the student-athletes' time," Powlus said. "That's part of the challenge of being a premier football stu- dent-athlete in today's world, so we want to have space for them to learn and study and, quite frankly, relax when they have 30 minutes in between commitments." Part of making players' lives easier is living in a larger building that involves fewer multi-use spaces. The Gug had nine position meeting rooms, Powlus explained, and Notre Dame now meets as 11 or 12 different position groups. Coaches had to use their offices as meeting rooms. At 162,032 square feet, which is nearly a 50% increase over the Gug, Shields Hall accommodates a pro- gram whose coaching and support staff has surged in size since 2005. Powlus and Notre Dame athletics di- rector Pete Bevacqua toured multiple fa- cilities around the country for inspiration, but they didn't use any individual one as a model. Instead, they picked and chose dif- ferent elements, i.e., "We like this sports science area, but we liked somewhere else's training room." The result, Powlus be- lieves, is something unique to Notre Dame. "Just the love and support behind getting Shields Hall here as fast as pos- sible from Ron, Pete," senior safety Adon Shuler said. "It was just a tremen- dous opportunity to be in here for camp, and it's like a breath of fresh air." ✦ Shields Family Hall's training and recovery room features several massage chairs, exercise bikes, treat- ment tables, hot tubs, cold tubs, aqua treadmills and everything players need to get and stay healthy. PHOTO COURTESY NOTRE DAME ATHLETICS