SOUTH BEND — Conspicuous but conservative, it stretches along Courtney Lane on the east end of the Notre Dame campus. It starts just off Leahy Drive and unfolds nearly to Twyckenham Drive.
If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know that Shields Hall is the new home — maybe the forever home — of Notre Dame football. It’s big (officially 162,032 square feet). It's expensive (cost just shy of $200 million). Given how the football program had operated for the last few years next door in the Guglielmino Center (which opened in 2005), it was somehow long overdue.
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Notre Dame football really does have everything to chase its first national championship since 1988. It’s hard to imagine Notre Dame football ever outgrowing the space and that place. It just works. All of it. Well, almost all of it.
Irish safety Adon Shuler was right. The senior captain joked earlier this month after the program transitioned from the Gug that he needed a map to navigate Shields. So many doors, so many turns, so many rooms and places to do what football programs must do on a daily basis. One map won’t do. Tour guide, anyone?
On Tuesday, August 25, with the Irish practicing on their grass field across the street, area media had a tour guided by someone who knows something about Notre Dame football and how far it has come from the days of dressing in that cramped locker space in the Joyce Center. Of hanging your smelly gear in those metal blue lockers that had been around since seemingly Knute Rockne.
Former quarterback Ron Powlus, now associate vice president/chief operating officer of the Notre Dame athletic department, led a 40-minute walk/talk tour of Shields. Powlus directed everyone from one spot to another as seamlessly as he commanded a two-minute offense under the late Lou Holtz.
Shields Hall combines the past, present and future of Notre Dame football into functional work/play/meet space. And there’s a lot of space. It all starts in the main lobby — the Hall of Champions — the center entry of the two-story building. You could spend hours in just that area. It’s Irish Football 101 at its finest.
To the left is an interactive all-time roster display. To the right, a souvenir case that holds such memorabilia as a Rockne playbook, a gold helmet and the commemorative football from the 1935 game between Notre Dame and Ohio State, an 18-13 Irish win in the first “Game of the Century.” Seven Heisman Trophies occupy one room. They’re all there. All lined up.
First thought about the lobby? Light a candle. A scented candle. With the doors to the training table — the Kramer Dining Room — to the immediate left of the main lobby, the smell of food is everywhere. The dining area has space for 237 varsity athletes, not just football players. Athletes on other Irish teams enter and exit through doors at the far west end of the facility, a subtle reminder that this is a football facility first.
At the back of the entry lobby, a door on the right and a right turn take you into the nerve center of the daily football operations. In the middle of another long hallway — Shields Hall was built out, not up — sits the Irish locker room. The wall on the right holds Shamrock Series highlights of seasons past; the wall on the left Under Armour football gear and souvenir footballs. It also has an array of laundry chutes. Gold towels in this one, white in that one. Blue over there.
Immediately outside the locker room, which includes a barber shop and a player’s lounge with the mandatory ping-pong table, players will see one of head coach Marcus Freeman’s favorite sayings — Choose Hard — complete with a C and an H inside a shamrock.
You lose track of how many shamrocks, leprechauns and interlocking ND logos are in the building. They’re everywhere. That includes the weight room — the Eilers Family Sports Performance Center — and its 37,000 square feet of space, which includes 30 weight racks. There’s room on the far end for basketball goals in case the football Irish want to shoot hoops. There’s a training ramp, specifically requested and designed with just the right vertical pitch by director of football performance Loren Landow, to help with speed/sprint training.
Need to recover after a long day on the practice field? It’s out the door, across the hallway, another turn or two and into the training room with a hydrotherapy area, hot and cold tubs and an underwater treadmill. Somewhere, there are saunas and steam rooms. Legend has it that the campus fire department was called on the first day that Shields Hall went online. Seems one football staffer turned up the sauna too hot and activated the fire alarm.
Better to be safe than sweaty.
The second floor is mainly administrative. Myriad offices down that hallway, meeting rooms, position specific, down that one. There’s a recruiting lounge, which includes several bowls of candy scattered about a comfortable sitting area that leads to one of three balconies that look out over the practice fields. The candy touch is pure Freeman. Wint-O-Green Life Savers in one, Laffy Taffy in another, Jolly Ranchers in the one closest to the coffee machines.
For the record, the office of the head football coach is Room 251.
There is one area of the building where you wonder if they really needed that. That would be on the second floor down the hall and through the doors from yet another cluster of meeting rooms. It’s what Powlus termed the Sensory Overload Room. One wall has more Freeman-isms (Challenge Everything, Unit Strength, Competitive Spirit). Another at the far end holds 24 gold helmets with a massive interlocked and lit ND. On the ceiling are the same nine diagonal lines found in the Notre Dame Stadium end zones. Google them.
Press a button and the opening of Here Come the Irish of Notre Dame plays before a Freeman voice-over of a pre-game speech. It absolutely is sensory overload. But if you can build it, built it.
Down the hall from Freeman’s office, past the postseason trophies from the Camping World and Cotton and Sun bowls, past the 72-person unit meeting rooms that still smell of fresh paint is the 4forForever corridor where stories of some of the former program greats are highlighted.
Stories of Tom Carter and Alan Page, of Jeff Faine and Justin Tuck. Of Manti Te’o and Rick Mirer. At the far west end is the common area (capacity 200) where players can study, take part in pre-game meals or find some quiet. Down a side staircase — past the slogans of Shake Down the Thunder and Send a Volley Cheer on High painted in gold across the blue walls — and you’re on the ground floor.
Twelve turns, 11 doors and 1,365 steps (give or take a dozen) after the tour started, you’re back in the Hall of Champions. If Notre Dame was going to do this, it had to do it right. It did it right.
Even with all that Shields Hall is, and there’s way too much to absorb in 40 minutes, something about it seems incomplete. A certain trophy that would sit as the centerpiece of the Hall of Champions, something everyone would see before everything else.
Maybe that finishing touch gets added in late January, 2027. It sure would complete the place.
Follow South Bend Tribune and NDInsider columnist Tom Noie on X (formerly Twitter): @tnoieNDI. Contact Noie at tnoie@sbtinfo.com
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Notre Dame football now has one heck of a new home to call its own