USF releases new vision for football operations center

The University of South Florida has released its first renderings of a new football operations center that will anchor its long-awaited on-campus football stadium. 

The TGH Center for Athletic Excellence will be a 150,000-square-foot operations hub for players and USF Athletics staff attached directly to the USF Bulls’ new $348 million football stadium, expected to open on the university’s Tampa campus in fall 2027. 

The new facility will be adjacent to the team’s current Porter Family Indoor Performance Facility and practice fields on the east side of the USF Tampa campus, according to a news release.

New renderings of the future home of USF Football, released Friday, show a grand entrance lobby with a two-story high ceiling. Inside will be a state-of-the-art weight room, team meeting room and a cafeteria-style “training table dining area,” along with coaches’ offices, position meeting rooms and a players’ lounge. 

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The TGH Center will also house some more nontraditional amenities for the team, such as sports medicine and recovery facilities, a barbershop, a recording and mixing studio, a nutrition bar and even a golf simulator.

“It’s going to be the nicest football complex in the entire country,” USF Head Coach Alex Golesh says in the release. “I give Jay Stroman (vice president for advancement and CEO of the USF Foundation) a ton of credit. They allowed us to take the time to do it right and go see places around the country that are the standard.”

Stroman and USF administration allowed Golesh and other USF Athletics staff to visit the last six university football operations centers to be built in the U.S. before finalizing plans for USF’s new TGH Center, Golesh says in the release.

“We took the best out of everything we saw and put together the plans for a building that will be absolutely awesome,” Golesh says.

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The USF Board of Trustees has also been accommodating to the team’s vision for the new stadium complex, approving an updated plan in April that increased the anticipated project cost to $348.5 million. That’s nearly $9 million more than original estimates given to the board in June 2023.

According to the university’s latest plans, the total cost for infrastructure needed to house the stadium on the east side of the urban campus is about $407 million. Those upgrades include installation of a new lift station, roadway improvements, new walkways and lighting as well as a new water main and stormwater facility. 

The TGH Center for Athletic Excellence will serve as the main entrance to the stadium’s south tower premium seating, with its spacious grand lobby opening onto Sycamore Drive. The lobby is designed to be a “flexible, dramatic space” that can also be used to host special events, the release states. 

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Inside the TGH Center, the athletes’ new weight room will include custom-built racks and a sports science lab equipped with “advanced performance technology,” according to the release. The weight room will also house a nutrition station, strength coaches’ offices and a DXA scan machine, which measures players’ bone density, fat and muscle composition. 

The Bulls’ team meeting room is designed with dual projection screens and tiered, theater-style seating spacious enough to seat the entire team and staff, according to the release. The “training table dining area” will be built to look like a sports bar and offer a variety of meal options overseen by chef and nutrition staff offices. The space will also include a teaching kitchen where student athletes can learn to prepare nutritious meals themselves, the release states. 

“They spared no expense,” Coach Golesh says in the release. “We’re going to have a building that is the new standard, a complete first-class environment.”