How many times have you driven down the Southfield Freeway near Rotunda Drive and looked over to see the very high peak of a white building and asked yourself, “What building am I seeing?”

That building is the Detroit Lions’ Headquarters and Training Facility, at 222 Republic Drive in Allen Park, where the Lions have called home since 2002. When you drive down Rotunda Drive toward the Rouge River, you see how mammoth the building really is! It may also be one of the most beautifully landscaped buildings in the city.

In late 1999, the Lions’ headquarter offices and practice facility were located at the Pontiac Silverdome, and the current training facility site in Allen Park was a heavily wooded forest in the Fairlane Business Park, owned by the Ford Motor Land Development Corporation. The Lions were planning to vacate the Silverdome and move to Ford Field in Detroit for the start of the 2002 NFL season. The Allen Park property was conveniently located midway between Detroit Metropolitan Airport and Ford Field.

The plan was to construct a facility that could serve as the Lions headquarters and the in-season practice facility – with both indoor and outdoor fields. Training camp locations had bounced around from Oakland University to the Silverdome to Saginaw Valley State University for 25 years, so a permanent location was highly desired. Project planners toured NFL practice facilities around the country to learn what they wanted and did not want in the new building – taking the best features to incorporate them into the facility.

Construction of the Allen Park facility started in 2000 with the preparation and seeding of the two outdoor, full-size regulation practice fields and another half of a field, prior to the erecting of the building and offices.

“On my early visits to the Allen Park site, I had to walk through an area of trees to get to the cleared land that would become the two football fields,” said Charlie Coffin, director of facilities for the Detroit Lions. “We needed to have the fields well established for day one of the facility opening.”

The Lions Training Facility sits on just over 23 acres. The part of the building that we see from the Southfield Freeway is the indoor practice field, which is 220 feet wide by 440 feet long by 110 feet high – over 96,000 square feet. The Detroit Lions administrative offices and support areas make up an additional 125,000 square feet.

In addition to the staff offices and indoor practice field, the building includes athletic training and rehab facilities; a hydrotherapy room; a weight room; locker rooms; a spacious equipment room; a kitchen and dining area; a players' lounge; meeting rooms for each position; an observation area for the indoor field; a broadcast studio; and a 103-person theater/auditorium to watch game films, conduct full team meetings and host large press conferences.

The Detroit Lions Headquarters and Training Facility was the world’s first LEED-certified athletic building. Green features of the facility include natural daylighting, intelligent mechanical systems design and the use of renewable and recyclable materials.

The facility handles nearly 98 percent of the organizations’ football operations – draft preparations, draft day functions, mini camps for rookie players, organized team activities for veteran players, training camp, in-season practices, post-season player interactions and free agency preparations. The remaining 2 percent are the 10 times per year that the Lions spend playing home games at Ford Field in Detroit.

These home games are treated as away games, as the support staff loads all the necessary equipment into moving trucks and then makes the 12-mile trek to Ford Field. After the games, the equipment is loaded back into the trucks and returned to Allen Park.

While the activities at the facility may slow down between the Super Bowl and the start of planning for the NFL Draft, and players and coaches take some well-deserved time off, many of the remaining Lions staff have year-round responsibilities for all the events held at Ford Field, including Detroit Lions football games, high school and college football games, concerts, tradeshows, and conventions.

Since the Lions moved into the Allen Park facility, staff numbers have nearly tripled. With NFL teams making big investments in players, they are heavily focused on player conditioning and nutrition, which means more training professionals and nutritionists have been added to the staff. The NFL rosters and practice squads have also been increased, and the area of digital media has seen a significant increase in staff as well.

The support groups outside of the football operations face many daily challenges.

“These individuals encounter constant change every day that they must adapt to,” Coffin said. “The coaching staff may decide to conduct a practice differently, which means the normal daily routines for these staff members will change. They know that football operations are the priority.”

One of the highlights for fans of the Detroit Lions is attending a training camp practice. Getting to one of these practices is special, because there is a daily maximum limit of 2,500 fans. The priority is for season ticket holders but there are opportunities for other fans to attend through partner organizations of the Lions.

Back in the spring, news came out that the Detroit Lions organization may be looking for more space for the team operations and more space to accommodate about 15,000 fans for training camp. City officials met with representatives of the Lions management team to express the City’s desire for the Headquarters and Training Facility to remain in Allen Park.

In the meantime, we all will continue to enjoy hearing our city, Allen Park, being mentioned by the media outlets as they discuss the Detroit Lions.

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