Carla Williams Details Size and Cost of New UVA Football Facility

How big will the new Virginia football facility be and how much will it cost?

Ahead of the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Virginia football facility on Thursday afternoon, UVA director of athletics Carla Williams met with members of the media to provide some details about the construction process for the new facility. 

One of the first questions Williams' answered was regarding the size and total cost of the new football facility:

Obviously it's a work in progress, but we're happy to get the construction started here now. It's 90,000 square feet. It's an $80 million facility. We've done I think an exceptional job during these trying times to have a project of this magnitude, to bring it to a groundbreaking. So we're excited about that. It is not flashy, but it is exactly what we need to compete for championships. That's what we wanted. You'll have everything that it should have. State-of-the-art sports medicine, which includes everything: strength and conditioning, coaches' offices, nutrition, the technology to help our players and coaches prepare, that's huge nowadays. As all of you guys know, the technology is a big part of what they do. Having a place that's dedicated to helping our coaches prepare our players to compete, we didn't really have that. It will be really important to have it now. 

Williams also confirmed that head coach Tony Elliott was consulted on the design and layout of the new facility and made some contributions:

We were not finished when we hired him [Tony Elliott], so he had a chance to look at the schematic designs and have some influence in that. And he did. There were some small changes, not many, but there were some small changes that we made to accommodate what he thought was really important. Primarily nutrition is really important to him, so we added some nutrition space and redesigned some things there. 

The construction of the facility, which will serve as Virginia's new football operations center and is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2024, is a major step towards getting UVA "caught up" with other Power Five football programs in terms of facilities and resources: 

It's been my focus this last four years. So I feel really good about where we are. Obviously with the groundbreaking today, that's a huge step. We started an emergency fund not long after I got here for football, and we were able to add positions for strength and conditioning, for recruiting, for nutrition. All of those things are paying dividends now. The structure is being repaired. We're not there. We still have a long way to go. But we have made great strides in making sure that we have a healthy football program. All of us, we know the benefits of a healthy football program.  

The new football operations center is the focal part of Phase II of the Virginia Athletics Master Plan, a massive renovation project that began with the implosion of University Hall to convert that land into natural grass football practice fields. Phase III of the Master Plan will include a renovation of the McCue Center, which has served as UVA's football operations center since 1991, as well as the construction of a new Olympic Sports Center. 

See more information about the new UVA football operations center and the Virginia Athletics Master Plan here.

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