This past October, the North Dakota State University athletic department unveiled the Nodak Insurance Company Football Performance Complex to student-athletes, coaches, staff, donors and fans with a ribbon cutting held on campus. The entirety of this $54 million facility was privately funded, no state or university funds were used.
This state-of-the-art training facility will train and develop NDSU football players, women’s soccer, men’s and women’s golf, baseball, softball and the men’s and women’s track and field programs throughout the year. Additionally, the complex will help enhance recruiting and demonstrates NDSU’s commitment to excellence.
The project’s completed first phase included construction of the full-size indoor practice facility and the outdoor artificial turf practice field that student-athletes utilized this past fall. The second phase, enabled by a $15 million gift from the WE B Giving Foundation, will be completed in Spring 2023. Phase two will include a football locker room, team meeting rooms, athletic training and equipment spaces.
The facility will cover more than 117,000 square feet, including the practice field, operations building and storage warehouse. It will ultimately include an elevated gathering area for recruiting visits and guests, a weight room and fueling station and a retractable netting system to accommodate multiple sports. There are seven overhead doors open from the indoor facility onto the outdoor practice field for ease of transition during team practices. LED lighting systems, scoreboards and play clocks are also installed on both fields.
The complex was designed locally by Foss Architects and Interiors of Fargo, in collaboration with Crawford Architects of Kansas City, which recently designed football practice facilities for the Minnesota Vikings and Seattle Seahawks.
In the past decade, NDSU has opened new competition venues on campus for basketball, wrestling, softball, indoor track & field and outdoor track & field, in addition to significant facility upgrades for volleyball at the Bentson Bunker Fieldhouse and soccer at Dacotah Field. Other new training facilities include the Nodak Insurance Company Basketball Performance Center and the golf indoor short game facility, as well as the stateof-the-art strength and conditioning and sports medicine amenities in the Sanford Health Athletic Complex, which opened in 2016. In all, the NDSU athletics facilities overhaul has totaled $110 million in projects over the past decade.
