The San Antonio Spurs’ new $500 million practice facility is nearing completion, just in time for No. 1 overall draft pick Victor Wembanyama’s rookie season – and it could well become one of the most sophisticated in the world.
Spurs CEO RC Buford spent nearly a decade planning the facility, visiting about 200 gyms around the world to see what works for other teams.
Ideas kept coming, not just from the basketball landscape, but also from skiing and football and eSports and cycling and even Formula 1. Hour after hour, day after day, he became more engrossed in the idea and more immersed in how to make it a reality.
The facility will be called The Rock at La Cantera, and it won’t just be an exercise room with a large locker room and some toys; it will be part of what the team envisions as a “global center for excellence in human and athletic achievement” – not to mention a huge commitment to the city of San Antonio.
“We’re not trying to build this to be the best in the NBA,” said Buford, the Spurs’ CEO and part of all five of the franchise’s championships. “We are going to build this for our needs and to have the best possible environment to help develop the Spurs culture. It’s not about being better or worse than anyone.’
The San Antonio Spurs are nearly done building a brand new $500 million practice facility
The facility should be ready in time for No. 1 Victor Wembanyama’s rookie season
Spurs CEO RC Buford (center) has been heavily involved in the planning of the new facility
It’s a natural pivot for Buford; he was the architect of the Spurs teams, and now he’s actually an architect of the Spurs’ next building.
There is no detail that is overlooked; the practice track in the new facility is essentially the exact same size and layout as the team’s current one — even the height, just over 25 feet, is the same, to try and replicate the same acoustics for when coach Gregg Popovich barks things during practices — and there’s even a reason why the new pizza oven is set up near the team’s dining room where it is.
Popovich has yet to be in the new complex, which is still a construction zone but will be ready for training camp in just over two months.
He gave Buford two mandates for the new facility: care for the people and protect the culture. And Spurs players get memories of the culture from the moment they park their car in the underground garage.
“We really tried to have this idea and this concept of a sense of arrival,” said Phil Cullen, the senior director of basketball operations and organizational development for the Spurs — and the project manager for the facility.
“So the players go up the stairs, they start to see the sight lines on the field and then they see the championship flags. And what this space is essentially built on is the quote from Pound the Rock.”
It is a Spurs credo, the quote from the Danish social reformer Jacob Riis: ‘Look at a stonemason who hammers his rock maybe a hundred times without a crack in it. But at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it wasn’t the last blow it did, but all that came before.”
It also offers a happy coincidence: It took the team preparing the construction site for construction about four months to grind through enough rock for parts of the building’s foundation, moving tons and tons of rock inch by inch.
Measures have been taken to protect the environment and reduce resource demand; there is a water collection system, solar panels on the roof, windows even at the right angle to protect against glare and keep the building cooler. It will be the largest mass timber building in Texas, the Spurs said.
The size of Wembanyama coupled with the shooting and dribbling of guards has already amazed fans
The rookie’s two summer league appearances proved to be a mixed bag of results
“The Holt family gave direct mandate that we had to develop this to have an impact on our community,” Buford said, speaking of the Spurs property. ‘It can’t just be the best practice facility in the world. We had to develop it in such a way that the community could communicate with it.’
The Spurs outgrew their current practice house — 37,000 square feet, with an Olympic-size outdoor pool in the back so Tim Duncan could swim laps — long ago. There is at least 90,000 square feet of basketball operations space in the new home, with more locker room space, larger meeting rooms, a much larger team video room, and more. (Still unclear: whether Popovich will have a wine cabinet like in the current facility.)
The original plan envisaged expansion of the current facility. That plan didn’t last long.
“It became clear that the cost of making what we need to happen here really makes this cost-effective to build elsewhere,” Buford said as he gave a tour of the grounds, wearing a helmet bearing his name.
There will be a few large viewing windows in what will be called the Spurs Club above the practice field. There will be a bar in a long reception room behind those windows. Buford and Cullen get equally excited as they look out the windows, away from the track, pointing at what is now just mounds of dirt and rocks.
In time, there will be a park for the community to enjoy, a splash pad, a restaurant, a large outdoor screen for people to come and watch movies or games. There is already a huge dog park, and the complex is on a trail that basically encircles the entire city – about 130 miles in total.
“You’re thinking about having family nights,” Cullen said. “The idea and the concept was that families could come here, have an experience that they didn’t have to pay a dollar for. If you want to come and just give your kids a good time, that’s what this is all about.”
Buford was recently photographed touring the facility during the construction process
Again, every detail seems to have been thought through. The hydrotherapy pools are 8 feet deep so that even the tallest players – Wembanyama is 7 feet, 3 1/2 inches – can be fully submerged in the water.
There’s plenty of room on the property for everything from basic athletic training needs to medical images. There are rooms designed with mental health in mind. It has enough storage space to make Spurs equipment managers the envy of the league.
They’re building a palace just in time for Wembanyama’s rookie season and the Spurs’ return to the NBA spotlight after a four-year renovation. It is also fortunate that all the stars seem to align at once.
“It’s very coincidental, and it’s also incredibly emotional and comes with a lot of responsibility,” Buford said.
Some Spurs employees say the project is part of Buford’s legacy. He shoots that talk right down.
‘This is not for me. This is for our team,” Buford said. “This is for our community.”