There are times when being the smallest school in the Power Five is a detriment to Wake Forest. Having loyal donors committed to expanding the athletic facilities is not one of them. Wake Forest football gets a new home as a result, as they unveiled this last week.
The ceremonial ribbon was cut on the new McCreary Football Complex, named after football alum Bob McCreary. The 60,000-square-foot addition is directly adjacent to the McCreary Football Field House. It took about a year and a half from the groundbreaking to the grand opening. It is now in full use as we head into the last week of Fall camp.
Celebrating the Finished Product
McCreary, for his largesse when it comes to Wake Forest football, was a sort of guest of honor Thursday. Athletic director John Currie, football coach Dave Clawson, and university President Susan Wente hosted a couple of hundred donors in the dining area of the new facility. The team was represented by Michael Jurgens, Malik Mustapha, Chase Jones, and Taylor Morin. During his speech to the crowd, Clawson pointed out that there are already seven college degrees among the group of four. “At Wake Forest, we still run a college football program,” Clawson told the crowd. “Our players go to class. They graduate. They’re integrated with the rest of the student body. And I think we should be proud of that.”
The new facility features expansive locker room space for 130 players. There is a nutrition station that looks like the best convenience store around. It has a barber shop, and a lounge with a pool table, ping pong table tables, oversized couches, and several large-screen TVs. There is a spa area. And then there are the hyperbaric sleep pods for napping needs. All of this came at a cost of $38 million dollars contributed by roughly 700 donors.
The Bigger Meaning
Clawson called the new complex a relationship space for players. “This is a space for our players to interact and hang out with each other and develop relationships. And I think at the end of the day that is probably the main reason why so many of players chose to stay.”
He talked about how in the age of the transfer portal and NIL he believes the football community at Wake has a significant relevance.
By reasonable and informed estimates, Wake Forest has between 73,000 and 75,000 living alum. That is not even enough to fill many Big 10 or SEC football stadiums on a Saturday. Indeed, as the smallest of the Power Five schools, the alumni base is going to be proportionally smaller. That means there are limits to trying to do it all with facilities and NIL opportunities. As one insider has told us, “You can only go to the same well [same donors] so many times in one year. That makes it a choice between giving to the facilities or giving to NIL.”
Impossible Spending Choices
Currie said the facility is completely paid for. When asked if the facility not carrying any debt means the same donor base can now be asked to give money to the NIL collective, Roll the Quad, Currie pointed out many NIL opportunities current athletes have. They were almost all pure NIL revenue sources with direct relationships between the sponsor and the athlete. Typically collectives are paying athletes just to suit up with few endorsement deliverables required.
At SEC Kickoff, Clawson referenced some of the NIL collective revenue offered to some of his players by other schools. Clawson did not pull punches in suggesting this would be clear violations of the NCAA’s unenforced tampering rules. The range was from $150,000 to $500,000. “We certainly not at an advantage with it,” Clawson said at the time. “But I don’t think we’re the bottom of the league either.”
When Roll the Quad launched last Fall some called it a game changer because of the names at the top of the collective. Atlanta Hawks part-owner Mit Shah joined the likes of Bob McCreary, Ben Sutton, David Couch, Alan Fox, Robert McCreary, Don Flow, and Michael Drum are the public names behind the effort. Collectives in the state of North Carolina do not have permission to operate in direct conjunction with the universities. And Wake Forest is a private university where financial agreements are rarely discussed openly and willingly. The result is there is no firm figure on how much Roll the Quad has given out to athletes. But there is no indication from anyone we have talked to within NIL circles that it is near the middle to the top end of the range Clawson gave above in his example of tampering.
Using the Room
That makes facilities like the new McCreary Complex play a bigger role in recruiting and retaining football players at Wake Forest. It gives the school a way to compete with bigger programs. “People say facilities aren’t as important today, and I don’t buy that,” Clawson told the media at the ceremony Thursday. “In some ways for us at Wake Forest, they’re more important than ever.”
With classes not yet underway at Wake, Clawson said he has experienced that players are spending their entire days in the now-larger facility. With practice, the film rooms, and the new complex all housed together, until classes start, they apparently don’t feel a need, or a desire to leave.
Clawson’s role in the design concept was as he put it, “Really what I wanted was one-stop shopping.” He said in particular for the freshmen the facility is close to their dorms and nearly as close to their classrooms. “There’s people [schools] that have great facilities but they’re five, 10, 15 minutes away from where the players live and go to class,” he said. He added that he thinks when putting the entire layout together, Wake Forest’s new facilities rank in the top 10-15 in the country.
Photo courtesy: Tony Siracusa
