Recruiting Breakdown: How the facility helps UVa on the trail

On Thursday afternoon, UVa football took a big step towards getting on even footing with many of its competitors. The athletic department celebrated the groundbreaking for the program’s new football operations center, which will replace the outdated McCue Center that has housed Cavalier football since 1991.

The new facility, which is slated for completion in two years time, will cost $80 million to build and comes in at 90,000 square feet. The facility is designed to do everything that McCue does and then some; it will house the team’s primary locker room, weight room, coaches offices, and plenty of other player amenities, that will make UVa’s facilities more competitive with its contemporaries. Bronco Mendenhall said last year that Virginia was dead last in the ACC in facilities and yesterday’s event is the first step towards fixing that reality.

The facility, and raising the overall level of the football program, has been Carla Williams’ primary goal since being named athletic director in 2017.

“My second day here we took a tour of the facilities and saw the need,” Williams said on Thursday.

Coming from a football power in Georgia, the disparity in facilities and amenities for players were surely staggering. But five years in, Williams has seen the improvements off the field, culminating in the construction of a brand-new football facility.

“So I feel really good about where we are,” she added. “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 know the benefits of a healthy football program.”

Fans may hear “football facility” and think about Clemson’s absurd football palace with a slide, barber shop and so on. But these buildings are so much more than that for the student athletes and can be the nucleus of the program itself.

In the new facility, UVa will be able to improve areas like weight training, moving into a training facility that is built for a team of 125+ student athletes. They will add to the sports nutrition program, something that new coach Tony Elliott pushed. And the new facility will be equipped with state-of-the-art technology, like the basketball staff enjoys across the street, that will help coaches evaluate players in more ways than ever before and help the program catch up from an analytics standpoint.

Virginia’s facility may not have headline-grabbing features like slides or putt-putt courses, but it will have everything the Wahoos need to move the program forward, including many of the things that McCue isn’t equipped to deliver.

“It is not flashy, but it is exactly what we need to compete for championships,” Williams said of the yet-to-be named building. “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 and other UVa brass toured other athletic facilities around the country to draw inspiration as this project reached the construction phase. Ultimately, UVa’s project might not be as costly as some others but there will be more in common with other state-of-the-art facilities than there will be differences.

“There isn’t anything secretive,” Williams explained when asked how the building will be laid out and what features it will include. “Every new facility has the same thing, but just a little bit different, maybe a little bit bigger, maybe a little bit smaller. What’s really special about our facility is I think the efficiency that we are going to create, because everything is right there. You’ve got the indoor that opens to the natural grass practice fields. Then you’ll have the facility with the weight room that opens to the natural grass practice field, next door to the indoor.

“Everything that they need will be in one place,” she added. “I think if you look around the country, that isn’t always the case for some facilities. I think adding the two natural grass practice fields first was huge. We really, really needed to do that. I think that was huge. Then we were able to fill in the gaps around it.”

There are many factors involved when it comes to recruiting top talent to a college football program, but facilities are certainly one of the most important. Virginia has plenty to sell, but the McCue had become something the recent football staffs have had to work around with prospects, rather than show off. The quality of facilities speaks directly to a school’s commitment to football. UVa’s brass, coaches, players, fans and alums may be more committed to football than their “dead last in the ACC” facility showed but eventually, the Cavaliers had to put up the money and truly demonstrate that championship commitment.

And with each shiny new facility completed by a rival, UVa has fallen further and further behind. And the impressive football buildings are not just for the sport’s elite like Clemson and Alabama; take a look at the relatively new football facilities at Northwestern and NC State, not exactly football powers.

It’s also worth noting that two recruits that UVa was involved with, both from the East Coast, recently chose Northwestern. UVa has plenty to sell, from beautiful Grounds to great academics and beyond. But other schools have plenty to sell too, and if football facilities are a significant deciding factor for the player or even if they factor in at all, it’s easy to see how UVa has come up short in some of those recruitments.

With the new facility on the way, it’s easier for the new staff to sell Virginia’s commitment to playing great football. On Thursday afternoon, Elliott said that the facility was “confirmation of the support and the investment that the institution and the athletic department are making in the student athlete.”

Offensive line coach Garett Tujague said the same when he joined the CavsCorner podcast this spring, speaking to how investment in a new facility demonstrates how the players are valued by the University and the community.

“I believe that this facility is paramount, and not just because you want to have nice shiny things and all that,” Tujague told the podcast crew, “to be valued and appreciated goes a long way.”

He also spoke about how much time football players spend in the facility, which becomes their second home in Charlottesville. Players practice there, study there, and in an upgraded facility, they can eat there and do so much else as well.

“If you have an opportunity to go to a place and eat together, that’s attached to the building, or you’re training right there, now you have an unbelievable opportunity to build on that camaraderie,” Tujague said about the benefits of a new building. “And now you’re able to accomplish greatness because you spent that time together not just doing football stuff.”

Recruits in the 2023 class and beyond will have access to the new football facility after one year or less in McCue.The closer UVa gets to opening the new building, the less Virginia’s lagging facilities should be a problem in recruiting. It’s a lot easier to say “this is where we are now, but this is where we’re going, not long after you arrive.” And recruits in the 2024 class and beyond will never have to use McCue.

“From a recruiting standpoint it’s going to help because the recruits get to see on the front end what the investment is and what the commitment is to having a successful football program,” Elliott said on Thursday.

Virginia’s new coaching staff is easing into the culture in Charlottesville and likely learned right away that facility upgrades were needed as soon as possible. Most of UVa’s regional rivals have upgraded facilities in recent years while UVa sits in a 30-year old building, and it’s not hard to imagine that the Hoos are the victim of negative recruiting from the competition.

“They’ve used a lot of things, and I think that time is going to come to an end,” Elliott said about other schools negative recruiting against UVa.

“It’s our job as a staff to make sure we properly educate the recruiting base and the fan base on what Virginia football is really all about. We know we’ve got work to do but we’re confident that we have a product to sell that’s better than anyone else in the country.

“All we’ve got to do,” he said, “is get young men on Grounds. Once they see the direction, once they realize and understand the vision that I have for this program, we’ll be able to change their perspective. And eventually people won’t be able to use those things they’re using against us right now.”

Elliott also mentioned that the culture inside the building is more important than the building itself, and he and his staff are already working on that while the construction of the actual brick and mortar begins next door. And while getting recruits excited about the new facility is paramount, Thursday’s event has to be exciting for the current group of Cavaliers as well.

“They’re seeing the dream realized. In recruiting you’re always trying to sell the future, sell the future and potential,” Elliott said of his current players that attended the groundbreaking ceremony. “A lot of these guys came here knowing this was a possibility and for them to actually see it, that’s why I said it’s a landmark day.”

Virginia football will have to wait about two years to walk into its new home, but the fact that construction is officially underway has to be comforting. Facilities demonstrate commitment from the University, and while Virginia’s athletic department often talk about commitment to creating championship programs, the football facility just hasn’t been at that level for at least a decade. But with construction underway, UVa has demonstrated commitment to excellence in football and has now put an $80 million check where its mouth is.