It’s halftime during the first game of the football season. The August heat is beating down on the field. Fans in their whiteout attire are drenched in sweat simply from being in the stands.
On the field, the players’ conditions are even worse. But this heat is a staple of Texas football.
As the players run off the field, some staggering as they long for water, they head past the metal gates by the outdoor basketball court and begin walking up a wooden ramp to a single, grey trailer.
But as the players walk through the rickety door, a new wave of heat hits them. Inside is damp, dark and hot air, removing any hope for a relaxing break. Players bunch up where their position groups should be, clambering over teammates to get to the right whiteboard.
The smell of football pads and damp helmets lingers as the players try to focus on mid-game adjustments. To most, there is one, counterintuitive thought running through their mind: When can we get back on the field?
Fortunately, this cramped, smelly reality has come to an end for all St. Mark’s athletes with the new Zierk Athletic Center and its locker room opening.
What was once a ceiling of patchy gray ceiling tiles, a collection of wooden pad hangers, and two stuffy bathrooms is now a state-of-the-art facility that rivals collegiate-level locker rooms.
Sixteen JBL speakers hang from the roof surrounding the large “SM” logo backlit with LEDs. On the ground, more than 100 lockers come equipped with cleat storage, cushioned seats, an additional locker for personal items and pad dryers on the top.
Around the corner is a long row of bathroom stalls, and further back, a row of showers. On the other hand, a nutrition station with multiple refrigerators and snacks will be provided to replenish the energy supply of tired athletes.
After five years, the school’s varsity teams will finally have a new home.
In 2019, an EF3 tornado rocked the north end of campus and destroyed Hicks Gymnasium, which in it held a brand-new locker room. Luckily, the tornado missed the single-story part of the building that held this new space, so the school was able to salvage many of the brand-new lockers.
While construction of the new Zierk Athletic Center was underway, the school and its teams had to adapt, deciding on using a portable trailer next to the outdoor basketball court for the varsity locker room.
When the trailer first arrived, it was a gray metal structure with little flavor, but the school was forced to pivot, quickly adding decoration and functional components to make the trailer a viable working replacement, albeit temporary.
“For what it’s worth, I think nobody necessarily wants their locker room to be in a trailer,” Head Football Coach Harry Flaherty said. “But I actually think that our athletic department did a nice job converting it into a highly functional space for us: room for equipment, whiteboards and bathrooms. It got the job done.”
Junior Adam Dalrymple is one of the football captains for next year, and because of that, is in the first group that gets to use the locker room for the entire year. His hope is that many of the good things from this past season are elevated with the new space.
“The locker room will be a lot more organized than the old one,” Dalrymple said. “We were really disciplined, and we always put up a good fight, and I’m really hoping that carries over into next season with a space like the locker room to build team culture.”
The new locker room will also add to the summer training on campus, especially football training camp in August. According to Dalrymple, the old locker room would get extremely hot during the day and training camp could feel disjointed with the film room being far away from where the team was resting. This is something that Flaherty believes the new locker room and facility will fix.
“Having the locker room, film room, athletics center and the gym all in one space, in addition to being at the entrance to the football stadium, will be much more convenient,” Flaherty said. “Before, everything was a little bit more scattered.”
From the player’s perspective, this holds true as well. Looking back on his football career, senior Mateu Parker wishes everything was in one place for training camp, which he thinks would have brought the team even closer together.
“This may change where the team will hang out,” Parker said. “It is now easy for guys to relax and enjoy themselves during training camp and they have all these nice things. Training camp is definitely going to be a massive improvement.”
But some senior players will get to use this space, even if just for a few games. Currently, the soccer team and basketball team are using the locker room. Even with games at the same time, the teams have enough space to share.
“Basketball is sometimes in there during halftime,” varsity soccer player Eduardo Mousinho said, “so we just spread out and soccer goes off to our side and it’s really effective.”
This cross-team connection is just another side benefit of the space and supports the school’s mission to build community. But this upgrade from a portable trailer highlights the commitment the school has to athletic excellence, something Flaherty believes the school hit on the head.
“We try to encourage our guys to think of themselves as being a part of a college-level program and the way we do things,” Flaherty said. “What we’re going to use is certainly a college-level locker room. I think it says a lot about the way we want to run our athletic program by promoting a picture of athletic excellence.”
