Here’s a rendering of the planned football locker room upgrades at KU.
KU Athletics
Lawrence
Long-awaited details about the the Kansas Jayhawks’ Anderson Family Football Complex renovations have finally arrived.
KU on Monday unveiled plans to upgrade the program’s locker and weight rooms at the football complex by July. The football program made the announcement via social media.
The project will start immediately following spring practice for the Jayhawks, with an official start date of Monday, April 10.
“This is a day that will be remembered as the very first step of the transformational changes that are about to occur at Anderson Family Football Complex and David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium,” athletic director Travis Goff said in a KU Athletics news release. “This is another sign of the institution’s commitment to providing the very best resources available for our football program.
“There is still much work to be done, and there is intense planning and preparation happening behind the scenes. But today is a day of celebration and a true indicator that we are all-in on making Kansas Football an elite program nationally.”
KU football coach Lance Leipold signed a contract extension in November that will keep him in Lawrence through the 2029 season. It included a contract provision calling for upgrades to the football complex/stadium.
Kansas must make “meaningful and substantial progress toward renovating” the stadium and/or football complex by Dec. 15, 2023, or Leipold could get out of his contract with a waived buyout.
The renovations detailed Monday should happen well before that.
“I am excited to see this project come together and know it will benefit our current players tremendously,” Leipold said. “It’s very important to our staff that our current players have the opportunity to benefit from the upgraded facilities, and this will ensure they do in a first-class way. We have taken several important steps to becoming a better football program over the past two years and this is another critical step forward.”
Earlier in February, Kansas athletic director Travis Goff raved about the plans for the football complex.
“What I was starting to see take shape is an operations building and complex that can rival just about anything out there,” Goff told The Star. “The facility aspects will be world-class and the location in combination (with) that means this will be something … that will rival anything in the country.”
Locker room installation will officially begin on July 7 and those facilities should be ready by training camp. The locker room will increase in size, growing from 6,000 square feet currently to 8,000 square feet.
According to the news release, “The lockers will also be equipped with extensive storage space for players, air flow to dry equipment, specific space for shoulder pads, glove hooks that will act as dryers, extra shoe storage and significantly more space for each stall than the team’s previous dimensions.”
The locker room will be equipped with 124 lockers, an increase of 14. The locker room will have a large “Kansas” script logo in the ceiling, as well as special lighting modes, such as “every day” “game day” and “recruiting.”
The weight room will also see a significant upgrade in size, to 15,000 square feet. It will be equipped with 18 platform weight racks, six more than in the previous weight room.
KU sports performance director Matt Gildersleeve will customize the rack height and weight. All of the racks will have special engravings on them related to Kansas football culture — logos, expressions and sayings the program lives by on a daily basis, according to the release.
KU also plans to lean heavily into sports science, including, “force plates and 1080Sprint, a portable resistance training and testing device for sprints and change of direction movements. The device uses intelligent variable resistance technology to provide a more controlled resistance. It measures power, force, speed and acceleration with high accuracy.”
The weight room will also have two video boards that will be used to demonstrate training techniques.
This story was originally published February 27, 2023, 6:09 PM.
