As the Texas Longhorns go through preseason camp with practices split between Frank Denius Fields and Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial stadium, head coach Steve Sarkisian and his players will finally get to use the Frank and Wofford Denius Indoor Football Facility before the season opener against the Texas State Bobcats next month with a grand opening set for Sept. 4, according to a Monday report from Chip Brown of Horns247.
“This new building is beautiful. It’s fantastic. It’s spacious. It’s high. You can kick in there. There’s a balcony on one side where you can watch practice from up top. It’s got garage doors that open right up to the grass practice field right outside, so we can actually even at times split the team — offense can go outside, defense can stay inside, and you can work the full field,” Sarkisian said last month.
“So there’s a there’s a lot of great things about it. The proximity, obviously, to the facility from a time efficiency standpoint. The air conditioning is actually real in there. So when you go in there, training camp and at night, you can do walk throughs, and guys aren’t sweating through their T-shirts and whatnot, so it’s wonderful. And again, I can’t thank everybody enough who has supported that project through CDC to make this come to life.”
One key advantage the new facility will provide is in allowing for faster recovery time for players after enduring the brutal heat of early-season games.
“We’re going to play Texas State at 2:30 to start the year. That’s going to take its toll. If you think about from a player’s perspective, they’re in the sun from pre-game warmups to pre game to the game. They’re out there for over five hours in full-blown armor,” Sarkisian said.
“The recovery from that isn’t just one day, it takes days, and so, the ability to go in there on a Monday and practice in the indoor, start getting their legs back, get the sun off them to get them ready for the next Saturday when Ohio State comes to town at 6:30 and the pregame warmups and all those things are still going to be in the sun until that sun sets on the west side of DKR and the lights come on. So early in the season, I think we’ve got to take advantage of it as well.”
The long-awaited facility began construction in late 2023 and was supposed to be completed by the start of preseason camp, but hasn’t quite been ready for use.
Not only does the facility provide critical parking spaces for athletes, it’s also only several hundred feet from the Moncrief-Neuhaus Athletics Complex instead of a half-mile walk from the current practice fields that requires players to bus from the football facility to the practice fields, a time-intensive process.
After arriving on the Forty Acres, head coach Steve Sarkisian quickly became aware of the logistical problems simply created by the narrow entrance into the outdated Bubble completed in 2002.
“One of the memories I have is the first time we were outside and we had a transition to go into the Bubble because of weather and lightning, it just didn’t dawn on me how long it would take to get 120 players, plus staff and video into the bubble. I was tapping my foot, and I was thinking to myself, if Nick Saban were here today, the top of the bubble might have blown off because you want to go as a coach, and you want to be efficient,” Sarkisian said during the spring.
In a few weeks, the Texas football program will never have that type of problem again.
