After years of deliberation, planning and construction, the Mackesy Sports Performance Center has finally opened its doors in Williamsburg, Va. for the College of William and Mary’s 500 student-athletes and 21 Division I sports teams.
University leadership and alumni made the project possible.
“It was a vision of three families — Katie [’95] and Todd [’96] Boehly, Jen Mackesy [’91] and then Jim [’57] and Jane [’56] Kaplan — but it was a partnership with President Rowe and university leadership,” Director of Athletics Brian Mann said.
While the 36,000-square-foot facility marks a significant step forward for the College, the project challenged the school to weigh academics and athletics.
“We are trying to educate our student-athletes, graduate them, help them go on and live lives of impact, but we also want to be great at Division I athletics, too,” Mann said.
However, it was not just prominent voices in the College’s community who made the center a reality.
Mann stressed student-athletes’ contributions to the Tribe athletics community.
“I feel that we are now better matching the commitment that our student athletes make to us, that they make to William and Mary,” Mann said. “This is about, ‘What does our individual student-athlete need to be their very best?’”
The planning process for the Mackesy Center, which began before Mann started as director of athletics in 2021, took on many forms. The final renovations and construction feature a strength training center, sports medicine suite and practice court for basketball and volleyball. However, these were not all part of the original vision.
“Some of the original plans for the project were pre-COVID,” Mann said. “Post-COVID, we shifted a bit. We decided to take some of the original focus on the larger building and fan experience but channel more of it towards our student-athletes.”
While the new facility prioritizes current student-athletes, Mann hopes it will signal the College’s broader commitment to valuing and respecting athletics.
“I think it is impossible to walk through that space and to think anything other than athletics matters at William and Mary,” Mann said. “From a recruiting standpoint, that message should come across now in a crystal-clear way.”
Mann said the holistic nature of the Mackesy Center — which also includes areas for counseling and an academic lounge, alongside academic support services staff — was intentional.
“When you recruit the type of student-athletes we recruit, they demand it because they want to be great,” Mann said.
Mann added that the facility’s academic lounge was a particularly popular request among student-athletes.
The timing of the center’s opening also works in the College’s favor. With the name, image and likeness fervor, many athletics departments find themselves spending less on traditional projects.
“It used to be every six months somebody was opening up something else, and people are not doing that right now because they are pushing their funds in different directions,” Mann said. “I think that not only does this put us in an incredibly competitive position, [but] I think it is going to keep us there, and for the longest time, that was not a space we occupied.”
When it comes to Mann’s broader vision for improvements, completing a project of this scale has not dimmed his ambition.
“We need to think back about turning to Kaplan Arena to try and deliver on some of those promises we made about fan experience [so] that we are doing more to drive more people into our space to create more revenue opportunities we can pour back into support for our student-athletes,” Mann said.
With rapid changes in college athletics, the challenge remains adapting to new realities while preserving William and Mary-specific touches.
“What is most important to me is to find the William and Mary answer to the question — the right one for us, not just because some other school is doing it that way,” Mann said.
