If ever there were a metaphor for the Broncos’ roster-building project, this is it.
In the coming weeks, the team will be surrounded by construction work. There will be excavators and cranes and measuring and digging and, eventually, building. Two years from now, a big, gleaming structure will stand where now there is just a grass berm and parking lot.
This, of course, is not actually a metaphor. It’s reality.
Almost as soon as the preseason wraps up, the Broncos are breaking ground on their $175 million training center and team headquarters.
To hit the target of being ready by the start of training camp in 2026, the massive project has to be completed in a shade under two years. As such, there’s little time to waste.
The construction crews have already been doing pre-work for months.
“We’ve been doing a lot of that since we made the public announcement,” Broncos president Damani Leech told The Denver Post in late May. “So surveying the land and making sure we know where the borders are, a lot of soil testing, potholing they’ve been doing throughout the facility for several weeks.
“Making sure we understand where power utility lines are is of critical importance. That’s been going on for a while as well. All of that, which is needed for any major construction project, has been going on for months.”
Now, though, the heavy lifting kicks into high gear just as the Broncos’ regular season does the same.
The Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group opted to delay the start of construction until after training camp finished to allow fans to attend 15 open practices with minimal change to the typical experience. With camp now finished, the construction of the new facility will take place on the berm West of the practice fields and extend west and north into the team store parking lots and along Broncos Parkway.
That means Sean Payton and company will be trying to build a surprise contender on the practice fields while work goes on well within sight — and within earshot.
Though the Broncos don’t anticipate any availability disruptions to the current facility, that doesn’t mean there will be a lot of peace and quiet, either.
“The schedule should not be impacted by the construction. What we’re most worried about is just noise, quite honestly,” Leech said. “… Where the berm is now there will be some large fences up, and once we get into excavation there will be a couple cranes in there. They’ll be making noise, so we’re sensitive to that.”
While the decibel level might be about to ramp up substantially, the design phase has moved from the exterior of the building to more of the interior finishes.
The Broncos have had the nuts and bolts of the building settled for a while. The first floor will be player-centric, including the locker room, training rooms, weight room and more. The second floor will be for football staff and then the third floor for business employees.
From there, though, there are hundreds of decisions of all shapes and sizes and textures to make.
That’s the fun part.
“We’ve started looking at what you’d call ‘experience design,’” Leech said. “How do players and employees move through the building? How do we want them to feel? What are the different experiences we want them to have? Which then starts to impact things like, what’s on the walls? Lighting. Is it carpet or is it tile? And all those things have costs. So we’re still very much driven by budget. …
“Once you move beyond the big, crisp renderings, you start to say, ‘OK, what exactly do we want that material to be?’”
It’s easy to put a building project in place. The actual work is tougher. But it’s also the rewarding part.
Just ask Leech. Or Payton. Everybody is trying to build these days.
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Originally Published: August 26, 2024 at 5:45 a.m.
