New LED lights flash in coordinated orange and purple patterns. Dozens of engraved plaques honor past team leaders on a new path that involved moving large, full-grown trees. Signs glow over plush lockers with each player's name, number and hometown. Those are some locker room area additions at Clemson University's upgraded football stadium as athletic departments work year-round to attract and keep the best players.

The efforts include making sure the real estate where players train and games are held are among the best money can buy.

Clemson wrapped up a complete overhaul of Memorial Stadium's locker room area just before the first home football game this past fall, positioning the improvements to be used in recruiting for the upcoming 2024 season. Improvements include the entrance path to the stadium for players and cheering fans and the other upgrades to energize team members. It was the latest phase of a $69.5 million project at the stadium in Clemson, South Carolina, that also included new seats, luxury suites and expanded concessions.

Collegiate athletic departments across the country — including Oregon State University, San Diego State University, Vanderbilt University and the U.S. Military Academy — have spent billions of dollars in total to make sure they don’t fall behind in a facilities arms race. Architects and builders face tight constraints on when they can work: In its latest project, Clemson had two general contractors on-site at the same time to finish before the next football season.

Athletic departments need to boost player recruitment while meeting fans' expectations for game day, said Don Barnum, an architect and sports group leader at DLR Group in Kansas City. DLR has worked on sports facilities at the University of Missouri and the University of Southern California.

"There is a growing demand for more unique, flexible and customized experiences, which is impacting the design of venues," said Barnum, who wasn't involved in the Clemson project.

It all amounts to the cost of doing business, Eric Sabin, head of capital projects in Clemson’s athletic department, told CoStar News.

“All of our improvements have an aspect of recruiting the next student-athletes,” Sabin said. “We always heavily involve the specific teams that will be impacted.”

The newly upgraded Clemson football team locker room, located under the stands at the 81,500-seat Memorial Stadium — nicknamed "Death Valley" as an attempt to intimidate opponents — is designed to make athletes want to play for the Tigers and to get them pumped up and ready for action on game day.

Clemson is looking for ways to reclaim a position among college football's elite programs. The Tigers won two national titles in 2016 and 2018 but have since fallen off, compiling a 9-4 record in 2023 at a school where fans are accustomed to the team going undefeated or losing only a single game per season.

Player recruitment is at the core of college football programs, and Clemson's stadium upgrades reflect its aspiration to bring in the best athletes from across the country, Sabin said.

Each player has a locker outfitted with his name and likeness on an illuminated placard designed with Clemson’s distinctive orange-and-purple color scheme to look more like something in professional football than a school facility. The locker room floor is covered with bright purple carpet with the Tigers’ logo, an orange tiger paw, in the middle and roped off to stop visitors from walking on it. The ropes are removed when players are getting ready for a game.

“The idea is to respect the paw,” Autumn Ressue, a graduate assistant in Clemson’s athletic department, said during a recent tour of the facility.

Architects at the firm LS3P were asked to expand the size of the lockers and create more space around the locker room, said Mike Martinez, an associate principal and senior project manager at LS3P. That required the removal of a concrete reinforcement beam that traversed the space.

“Eliminating that beam allowed us to get the volume that this locker room never had until this project,” Martinez said during a tour of the facility.

Dabo Swinney, the football team’s head coach, specifically requested that the locker room be redesigned to give it more space, Martinez said.

They had a tight time frame to complete the project, with construction beginning immediately after the 2022 season. It was an “all-hands-on-deck” situation, Marissa DiLoreto, an architect at LS3P, said during the tour. Every architect and interior designer in the firm’s Greenville, South Carolina, office was assigned to the Clemson stadium project, she said.

Simultaneously, construction began on the Tiger Walk, an entry path for players on game days with the plaques in the walkway of the previous half-century of team captains. Two general contractors, Brasfield & Gorrie and Thompson Turner, were hired to make sure the work was completed in the seven-month time frame.

“Football was going to happen,” Martinez said. “There’s no way around that schedule.”

Trees were moved in to create the Tiger Walk path that runs 700 feet and is lined with brick pillars and landscaping. The captains' plaques are set in the walkway to show players there's a chance they could be remembered long after they leave. A gateway on Perimeter Road marks the entrance where players are dropped off by bus to make the slow walk into the stadium, surrounded by fans and family members.

Plans call for Tiger Walk to connect to a future trail running through the athletic facilities portion of the Clemson campus, all the way to nearby Lake Hartwell to serve both the team and the broader campus.

The scope of the project meant LS3P was essentially serving two bosses — the athletic department and the campus facilities department, Martinez said.

“It was important that this project not only connect to the stadium, but really connect to the campus at large,” Martinez said. “This project became a way to visually create a base to connect the stadium to the grounds in a way that wasn’t happening before."

LS3P was the architect of record for all work done at Memorial Stadium going back to 2015, he said.

Clemson has no construction work scheduled at Memorial Stadium for the 2024 offseason, but plenty is on the drawing boards for long-term projects, Sabin said.

The university is looking at further widening the stadium concourses to make it easier for fans to get around and to create space for additional concession options. The program also wants more stairwells and enhanced safety features in the seating areas and to improve the circulation of fans throughout the stadium by widening concourses.

And more dramatic changes still could come: “I’m sure Dabo has something in mind to get more recruits,” Ressue said.

LS3P was the architect of record and Aecom was the design architect. Brasfield & Gorrie and Thompson Turner were general contractors. Sexton Design & Development was the landscape architect.