From napkin to crown jewel: Inside USCs football

The initial idea for USC’s Bloom Football Performance Center was first born on the back of a napkin. It was late November 2021, and Lincoln Riley was on a aircraft to Los Angeles, where he was slated to be launched as USC’s coach.

The then-hypothetical facility had been a crucial contingency for Riley, who never toured USC’s services, but knew — like most people around faculty football — that the Trojans had been critically missing in that division. For years, USC officers had resisted doing something about it. The John McKay Center hadn’t even been around a decade, they’d inevitably say. Plus, there was the not-so-insignificant downside of where to construct a new facility on campus.

Riley knew that. And he requested anyway.

“That was a little bit, in that moment, my way to test how committed SC was,” Riley said Thursday. “This honestly was probably the biggest test of commitment for, ‘How invested are we to get this program back?’ When that was met with no hesitations, that was a pivotal part of me taking this job. I think it’s fair to say, if that commitment hadn’t been made, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

Almost 5 years later, the plans Riley sketched out that morning have been introduced to life in one of faculty football’s most interesting services, the towering jewel of a $225-million capital project at USC that also consists of a new baseball stadium (Dedeaux Field) and a ladies’s soccer and lacrosse discipline (Rawlinson Stadium).

The three-story, 163,000-square-foot football-only facility opened Wednesday evening, with Riley reflecting back on that napkin and marveling at how far this system had come since. But this gleaming building and its array of facilities had far exceeded his initial expectations, he said.

He called it “magical.”

“You can say or promise that you’re gonna build a facility, and then you can halfway do it or you can do it right and just go over the top and just really not hold back in any way, and that’s what our university has done,” Riley said. “I’m proud and thankful for the university for making this happen.”

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1. Bronze plaques of earlier USC gamers adorn the wall of the Mark and Mary Stevens Trojan Legacy Wall at the USC Bloom Football Performance Center. 2. The weight room of the USC Bloom Football Performance Center. 3. A wall of USC gamers drafted by NFL groups at the Bloom Football Performance Center. 4. Trophies gained by the USC football program on show at the Bloom Football Performance Center.

The real magic was that it occurred at all, contemplating all that modified or had gone awry. The athletic director who first agreed to Riley’s facility request, Mike Bohn, resigned. The college president who signed off on it, Carol Folt, retired.

The price of doing business in faculty football also went up exponentially with the appearance of income sharing, all while the college was going through a financial disaster. None of which helped when it got here to asking for $200 million in non-public donations.

Then there was the matter of bodily space. The only option to construct the power was to demolish the Trojans’ longtime baseball discipline and displace this system for a number of seasons.

Hot tubs at the USC Bloom Football Performance Center.

“Think of what Coach Stank and the baseball team, what they had to give up to make this work,” Riley said. “The importance of just getting everybody together and on the same page and pushing in the same direction, this building is one of the first real signs of that. Because this took everybody.”

Riley, in explicit, proved to be “very influential” in the method, according to Jeff Fucci, USC’s senior affiliate athletic director for capital tasks.

“Coach was tireless in making sure that this was something that was not going to just be a vision and something that was talked about and not followed through on,” Fucci said.

It also took endowing just about every bodily space in the power to raise the required $200 million to construct it, from the “Peets Family Atrium” to the “Al Cowlings Defensive Tackles Room” to a hallway labeled as the “Mark and Mary Stevens Legacy Walk.” Even some of the loos bear plaques from donors keen to get their identify someplace in the building.

The locker room at the USC Bloom Football Performance Center,.

“This has been a huge, huge investment from the university,” Fucci said.

The result’s a facility that stands in stark distinction from the John McKay Center, which price $70 million when it opened in 2012. That building was “80% subterranean”, according to Fucci — with not almost enough space to include the football program, let alone the other sports activities applications that used it.

Natural gentle pours into Bloom Center, by distinction. Thirty-foot glass doorways open up onto the Trojans’ observe discipline from a 12,000-square-foot weight room with towering vaulted ceilings. From above, an outside terrace is outfitted particularly for internet hosting recruits or other luminaries, full, for the time being, with basketball courts and pickleball.

“I love coming to the weight room in the morning,” said offensive lineman Tobias Raymond. “The sun is coming up, and you can see it, and you open the doors and you get the fresh air blowing in.”

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1. Jeff Fucci, USC senior associate athletic director, leads the media on a tour of the Bloom Football Performance Center on Thursday. 2. USC players make their way to the locker room. 3. Mannequins on display with USC football uniforms outside of the on-site cafeteria at the Bloom Football Performance Center. 4. The cafeteria at the Bloom Football Performance Center. 5. The weight room opens near the practice field.

Riley wanted the facility to put a special emphasis on recovery. So now, players have access to infrared beds, sensory deprivation tanks and AI-led massage chairs. There are hot tubs and cold tubs and a players-only sauna, while every locker is outfitted with a leather zero gravity chair. There’s even a barbershop.

“It’s hard to get our players out of here,” Fucci said.

Riley has been no different. Shortly after moving in, with his family out of town, the coach said he hunkered down for five straight days in the facility.

Before, that would’ve meant barely seeing the sun. But now, as the sun poured through the third-floor atrium of the Bloom Center, Riley couldn’t help but point out the symbolism of such an ambitious undertaking actually coming to life.

“They said it couldn’t be done,” Riley said. “But here we are.”

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1. The football practice fields next to the Bloom Football Performance Center. 2. The rooftop deck, an event-ready space at Bloom Football Performance Center. 3. USC football coach Lincoln Riley, left, speaks to the media in the team room at the Bloom Football Performance Center on Thursday. 4. The lobby of the Bloom Football Performance Center.

Injury update

Projected starting center Kilian O’Connor suffered a non-contact injury during USC’s camp practice Wednesday and will be out for the rest of the season, Riley announced.

“Tough one for the guys to see,” Riley said. “A great reminder for all of our guys just how nothing in this game is ever guaranteed. We’re fortunate to have enough depth on the O-line that we’ve been working on to continue to push forward.”