USC breaks ground at Bloom Football Performance Center
Trojan alumni Ronald H. Bloom was honored for his $50 million dollar donation at naming ceremony.
By PEYTON DACY
The University ceremonially broke ground at Bloom Football Performance Center Thursday morning. The center was named after the Ronald H. Bloom family, who donated $50 million to USC Athletics to fund this project. The Bloom family is full of USC alumni, including Ronald H. Bloom, the patriarch of the family who graduated from the University in 1955.
“I’m so proud and so very, very happy to be here. This is a necessary and wonderful, fantastic facility that’s going to be built,” Bloom said during his dedication speech. “It’s a football program that has been mentioned around for a long time. Football has been a part of my life for the past 75 years.”
Bloom Center will be more than 160,000 square feet when completed, more than doubling the current square footage of USC football facilities. This space will house two full-length practice fields and will also have dedicated spaces for student athletes to connect and study with each other.
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“[Bloom Center will provide] opportunities for student athletes,” said Michael Haick, Associate Director Operations, Facilities & Event Management, in an interview with the Daily Trojan. “Not only on the field, to develop student-athletes, but also as young men as they approach their college career.”
As USC and college football enter a new era, Bloom Football Performance Center will be critical to the success of USC’s football program. The facility is part of a larger “moonshot” goal from President Carol Folt, who has championed a new stadium for women’s soccer and lacrosse as well as renovations at Galen Center.
“Anytime that you can upgrade to new technologies, new trinkets into a program, it elevates the program,” said Haick. “It made a great impact at Nebraska, Florida, University of Alabama, Ohio State. So modernizing performance centers is definitely one of the critical steps to achieving success.”
USC ended the dedication by symbolically breaking ground at Bloom Center. Folt, along with donors, picked up USC-branded shovels and pushed them into the dirt to officially break ground. Cardinal and gold streamers exploded at the dirt’s parting, and the USC marching band blared the fight song to usher in a new era of Athletics.
