After coming up just short in the AFC championship game last season, the Denver Broncos’ new headquarters and training facility could give the team an edge this year.
After two years of construction, the three-story, 205,000-square-foot, mass timber building opened last week as players arrived for their 2026 season training. “To hear Broncos players talk about it, the new digs could make a big difference as the team tries to finish the job in which it fell just short last January,” Andrew Mason, a senior writer for Denver Sports, said in a video report on the new building.
HOK, the design and architecture firm that worked on the project, said keeping all of the player resources close together was essential to the team. In the old facility, the weight room was on the other side of a parking lot from the locker room, limiting how much weight training players pursued.
We “analyzed player step counts between the weight room, locker room and indoor practice facility, discovering totals that far exceeded those at several comparable NFL sites,” the firm said in a blog post. “This data directly shaped the building’s layout and adjacencies.”
At a press conference, Quinn Meinerz, an offensive right guard, said the close proximity between the locker room and the weight room could mean players are likely to train more.
“It sounds so spoiled, but, you know, you [had] to walk a little bit” previously to train, Meinerz said. “Those little minutes of time … add up,” he said.
"We wanted to size [the facility] in a way that player travel, and how they manage their daily work, was easy for them," Greg Penner, the team’s owner and CEO, said in the press conference. “The whole first level will be player-oriented. That will be tied into the field and the weight room.”
A bigger locker room could help, too. Last year the team’s locker rooms received an “F” on the NFL Players Association’s report card for its quality, and only 42% of surveyed players said the locker room size was adequate, ranking the Broncos 30th out of 32 teams, according to the report card.
“The lowest grade the Broncos got was for their cramped locker room,” the Denver Post reported.
The new locker room is 6,000 square feet, comparable to those at other teams’ headquarters. For example, the new locker room for the New York Giants, which is still under construction, will be 6,000 square feet as well, according to a Bleacher Report update.
Overall, the Denver facility is 30% larger than the one it replaced and provides an additional 21,000 square feet of player space, according to the team.
“It’s like we’re … entering a new state,” cornerback Pat Surtain II said at the press conference. “Everything’s starting to come together with the facility, and I’m looking forward to building with the guys and being able to be in this building.”
