Efforts to complete USC’s Bloom Football Performance Center stretched all the way to Ireland

LOS ANGELES — For the first time, all of the USC football program’s 11 national championship trophies are in one place.

The brand new, 163,000-square-foot Bloom Football Performance Center – part of the $225 million Athletics West project – has brought all of them together, and the coordination stretched all the way to Ireland to make it possible.

“I don’t think that when we started the journey, we thought that was part of it,” Jeff Fucci, USC’s senior associate athletic director, said.

“But as we did more due diligence, we realized, OK, if we really want to do this, if we really want to have the authentic representation of what the highest accomplishment is – that is a national championship trophy.”

The sparkling crystal footballs atop the trophies are scarce, and specifically made in Ireland. USC needed a few replicas to complete the arrangement of national titles and had the facility create the pieces abroad, ship them to the United States and have them assembled and trucked to campus.

They serve as a shining welcome for all who enter the Bloom Center, which was officially opened on Wednesday after 636 days of work, and are among many symbols that represent the past, present and future of the Trojans.

“There’s not a lot of fluff in this building. Everything in this building is done for a specific purpose,” head coach Lincoln Riley said Thursday. “Everything here is done to give our players advantages, to give our football program advantages.”

Building a new performance center was a key bargaining chip in getting Riley to come to Southern California. He brought it up during the first phone call he had with USC, believing that it would help with recruiting as well as player and staff retention.

“This honestly was probably the biggest test of commitment for how invested we are to get this program back,” Riley said. “And when that was met with no hesitation, that was a pivotal part to me taking this job. It’s probably fair to say if that commitment hadn’t been made, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

USC and HNTB Architecture had to make one drastic change to the tightly packed, 220-acre campus in order to make the Bloom Center possible: move the baseball stadium.

Rotating Dedeaux Field roughly 90 degrees opened up a new chunk of space that allowed for two side-by-side practice football fields and room for the Bloom Center. It also allowed for the baseball program to get new facilities of its own.

“By doing that, it all of a sudden gave us all sorts of opportunity,” HNTB studio leader and project director Dave Graue said, “and the commitment of the staff and the organization, USC itself, to say, let’s do something transformational. Let’s take this next level in our programs.”

The look of the Bloom Center meshes with the transitional Romanesque style of architecture across campus. The facility is built to the same scale as its surrounding buildings, and far enough back from the sidewalk that it doesn’t crowd the campus.

Through the entryway and past the national championship trophies of the past is the future of college football at USC.

Natural light floods the three-story building from the “slot canyon” window in the ceiling – a stark difference from the underground facility that the Trojans were previously using. Floor-to-ceiling windows bring light into the sports medicine room, and 30-foot glass garage doors in the sports performance space open to provide a path directly to the practice field.

The first floor was designed with the players in mind, starting with the sports performance space. USC is the first football program to partner with Nike Strength to build a 12,321-square-foot, all-Nike space with customized dumbbells, plates and racks that are wrapped in cardinal and gold.

A barber shop, equipment room and player’s lounge with arcade games and overstuffed furniture are attached to the locker room. The Trojans have even more space to socialize on a third-floor terrace with a basketball and pickleball court.

New recovery technology is spread across the first floor. There are hot-and-cold contrast rehab pools that dip to as low as 53 degrees and AI-powered massage chairs that adjust based on how the user is reacting to the chair pressure.

Nearby is a room walled with living moss and containing infrared beds, sensory deprivation float beds and nap pods.

The third floor is mostly coaching offices, and the second floor brings players and coaches together with meeting rooms and a “walkthrough room” similar to what most NFL teams have. A 45-foot-wide screen can show formations on the field and gives players a new way to experience film sessions.

“Especially for an O-lineman, it’s going to be pretty nice,” offensive lineman Tobias Raymond said. “You can watch blitz cut-ups and see what’s happening in front of you. There’s a whole bunch of things, but it’s going to be awesome to prepare for games in there.”

The hope is that it all leads to more trophies in the Bloom Center foyer.

“It’s a really big deal for us to come in here and to start the standard, to be the standard and to get the young guys as well as anybody who’s here to uphold that standard,” cornerback Christian Pierce said. “It’s a very big deal for the team; it’s a very big deal for the university as well as the program.”