Located at the north end of Bobby Dodd Stadium/Grant Field, the Homer Rice Center for Sports Performance is comprised of six sports performance clinics which occupy 44,000 square feet of the Arthur B. Edge Intercollegiate Athletics Center at the J.C. “Bud” Shaw Sports Complex. The $8 million facility also includes the Howard Candler, Jr., Football Conference Center and the George Mathews Athletic Heritage Center, a museum of Tech’s rich athletics history.
The Center is in partnership with the Institute to establish a research and development entity focused on the studies of human movement. The Center’s efforts concentrate on performance enhancement for student-athletes participating in the sports programs of the Georgia Tech Athletic Association with services also available for Tech students, faculty and staff.
“The Sports Performance Center and the programs it encompasses will take us to the next level to provide our student-athletes with total development-academically, athletically, professionally and personally,” said Rice, who retired in 1997 after 17 years as Tech’s Director of Athletics.
The Center, under the director of Larry New, utilizes the philosophy that goals must first be defined before they can be reached. To accomplish this, a staff of highly trained specialists uses the latest in sports and medical technology to measure and record the current status of every dimension of the athlete’s psycho/biological condition. The measurement data from each of the five performance clinics is combined to construct a comprehensive “performance profile” of the athlete. This detailed blueprint of each athlete’s individual potential provides a specific starting point to customize and implement strategic goals as well as an optimum training regimen for reaching them.
The facility currently focuses on six areas related to performance: physiology, nutrition, sports medicine, psychology, motion analysis and vision.
The ground floor houses the Sports Medicine, Sports Physiology and Vision departments, while the second floor contains areas for Sports Psychology and Motion Analysis. Nutrition is located adjacent to the athletic dining hall in the Edge Center.
