EUGENE — In its origin, ambition and aesthetics, the Marcus Mariota Sports Performance Center carries all the hallmarks of the handful of other athletic facilities unveiled by the University of Oregon in recent years.
Like the $95 million Hatfield-Dowlin Football Complex that opened in 2013, and the $42 million John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes in 2011, the Mariota Center, which opened in August, is an homage to its namesake built on property leased from UO to Phit LLC, a private group financed by Nike co-founder Phil Knight. Once completed, the facility was then donated back to UO as a gift from Knight and his wife, Penny.
This nine-month project’s price tag: $19.2 million, according to a 2015 Eugene building permit application covering construction costs. And just as inside the other facilities, that money bankrolled a 30,000-square-foot facility filled with swooshes and superlatives whose mission is to be functional for employees and unforgettable for recruits.
The Ducks naturally call the facility unrivaled, at least for the time being, in what is often called college athletics’ arms race.
Though the facility opened last summer, prior to UO’s 4-8 football season, and visiting recruits have often shared photos on social media of such features as the 450-pound wooden throne dedicated to “Uncle Phil” and “Aunt Penny” ever since, Saturday was the first time Oregon provided a tour for media, saying the delay was because staff continued to move in throughout the fall.
Compared against other collegiate facilities “this has got everything and more,” said Andrew Murray, UO’s director of performance and sports science since last summer. “And it certainly looks better.”
The latest project, however, was different in a key way. Where its gaudy predecessors were ground-up new construction whose only limit was the budget, creating the Mariota Center required transforming a pre-existing space inside the first floor of the Casanova Center, UO’s athletic department headquarters, while allowing the rest of the building to stay open for business and keeping its footprint virtually the same.
Nonetheless, though the the Mariota Center — which Mariota himself is using this offseason to rehab the broken fibula that ended his promising second NFL season — fills just a portion of a larger building, it can look and feel like entering a wholly separate facility by just walking down a flight of stairs from the Casanova’s second floor.
Its white walls and frosted-glass interiors hold 2 1/2 miles of shelving to hold up to 2,000 helmets, dozens of motion-capturing cameras and three steam-machines to help athletes break-in their sneakers more quickly (and Nike is said to have only made five of those steamers).
Though UO’s former football locker room, and its weight room, each already had a mezzanine level as part of their design, a challenge was adding that level throughout the new facility. It now holds office space, a 40-yard dash track and a room that assesses “neurocognitive vision” and reaction time, among other uses.
Designing the mezzanine, which required rerouting utilities, lighting and more, was “part of the architectural genius, or nightmare,” Murray said.
This being Oregon, no detail comes stock.
The flooring isn’t simply rubberized, but inset with hundreds of individual laser-cut wing-patterned cutouts. In the hallways, the lighting changes throughout the day to mimic the conditions outside. Mariota is famously reserved and keeps a low-profile. Now, if a visitor raises a cell phone to take a photo of the lobby ceiling, an image of the quarterback emerges from a mosaic of backlit flying Duck logos.
Once past the lobby filled with eight Mariota trophies, the space is divided, broadly, into areas for performance and recovery; equipment storage, and recruiting. Ducks staffers take recruits’ measurements and enter them into a computerized inventory database; should they sign, UO will have their gear waiting upon arrival as freshmen. Should they get tired at Oregon, they can nap in egg-shaped pods inside a room called “Sandy Beach,” named after Mariota’s favorite stretch of sand on Oahu. And should they get injured, they can work on their conditioning by punching at decals of Pac-12 opponents reimagined as lucha libre masks that dot heavy boxing bags.
Toured Oregon’s Mariota Sports Performance Center today. They thought out the details. pic.twitter.com/8o5aUHtooB
— Andrew Greif (@AndrewGreif) February 11, 2017
But Ducks officials say the space’s function matches its intended flash.
The remodel tripled the size of UO’s equipment room to 15,000 square feet, which means a small army of outdoor storage trailers are no longer necessary to handle the overflow gear that comes with being Nike’s favorite fashion plate. The former football locker room, which was top-of-the-line a decade ago, now is filled with 16-foot-tall columns of space-saving equipment storage that roll on tracks with the twirl of a handle. They sit across from a loading bay where director of equipment operations Aaron Wasson said UO receives hundreds of packages daily. When delivery trucks arrive, staffers roll up a garage door carrying an image of the smiling Knights riding the motorcycle that precedes every UO home kickoff.
Six washers and dryers in a room dubbed “The Pond” have cut hours off the time it takes to handle the 500 pounds of dirty gear UO football accumulates on game day, Wasson said. It’s a dirty job many are vying to do: Wasson holds student manager tryouts every fall (the students earn a scholarship for their work).
Imprinted on a mousepad near UO’s wooden throne is a Tony Dungy quote: “I always loved our equipment managers.”
Down a hallway from the equipment lockers — where some staffers keep a copy of Knight’s 2016 memoir, “Shoe Dog,” at their desk — Murray oversees a sports performance division that measures and analyzes everything from an athlete’s gait, to their vision, to their last night of sleep. Cameras inside squat racks track a path of a bar. Sensors in the floor determine an athlete’s balance, or lack thereof. Whereas concussion testing used to take place wherever staffers could find a quiet space, a room is now dedicated to it.
Whether from touch-screen questionnaires or GPS sensors worn inside shoulder pads, the amount of data collected is enormous. And it’s useless unless Murray and his team synthesize it into usable insights for coaches and players.
His favorite part of the facility, then? It’s the hidden stuff — the back-end computing power that crunches the numbers and, he hopes, will make UO’s teams appear as advanced as the facility they call home.
“That is the key piece,” Murray said. “That’s something that happens on a daily basis.”
— Andrew Greif
agreif@oregonian.com
@andrewgreif
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