Purdue basketball locker room renovations underway: 'To us, that's an important space'

WEST LAFAYETTE – Elliot Bloom has done the math.

“If you’re a college athlete and you’re going to be someplace for four, five years, there’s a great chance you’re going to spend between 1,200 and 1,500 days in the locker room,” said Purdue’s director of basketball administration and operations for coach Matt Painter’s program.

“It’s very accurate to say kids are going to spend 300 out of 365 days a year going into the locker room. To us, that’s an important space. It’s very hard to justify a space that is more important than the locker room area.”

That’s one reason why the locker rooms for the men’s and women’s basketball programs are undergoing renovation projects, the first significant change to the spaces since Mackey Arena received a $100 million facelift more than a decade ago.

The $6.7 million privately funded project, which was approved by the board of trustees last spring and also includes renovating the John Wooden Club, is underway. The teams are expected to return to their respective locker rooms by mid-September before the start of the 2023-24 seasons.

“If you want a team that’s close on and off the floor, you need a space for them to be able to be close off the floor,” Bloom said. “That always ends up being the locker room and lounge.”

The footprint for the locker rooms isn’t growing, but the space will be reconfigured and updated to provide modern amenities, highlighting recovery mechanisms for athletes along with an enhanced focus on nutrition.

“Those are two of the biggest areas across the board,” Bloom said. “A lot is being made of recovery, off days between practices and what you’re putting in your body.”

The film room will be scaled back to create more space for the player’s lounge, which will include a modernized fueling station featuring food, healthy snacks, and recovery shakes that will be utilized following workouts, practices, and games.

The current space for the managers and storage area will be repurposed into the recovery room, a growing trend in college athletics. It will feature sleeping pods, massage chairs, and Normatec Compression Therapy sleeves to help with the recovery process.

“You benchmark against certain programs, and what they have, and in our recovery room, we did some things that are probably newer than some other places,” Bloom said. “There weren’t as many ideas to steal – we had to come up with some on our own.”

The centralized location of both locker rooms remains a strong selling point in recruiting. The training room, training table, practice court, weight room, and the Mackey Arena playing floor are accessible without leaving the building.

“A lot of places don’t necessarily have it like that,” Bloom said. “Our guys can go down and get treatment with our trainer and go back down the hall in the locker room and either hang out in the lounge or go grab a nap before practice in the recovery room. In some programs, you have to drive across campus to go to their practice court.

“We have everything right here. In the middle of the season, and you’re going 10 days without a day off, any extra time you can get is huge. I don’t know if people appreciate the amount of time these guys spend in season and out of season in all these facilities.”