The Bright Football Complex is a 50,000 square foot facility designed to office football staff and space for units that support Texas A&M Athletics and the student athletes. As part of the renovations currently underway, five support units housed in the complex were relocated into neighboring football suites. These units include academics, student services, nutrition and dining, sports psychology and compliance, all of which provide daily support in their respective areas. After the Bright Football complex is fully renovated, the space will be used exclusively for football practices.

Since the football suites are designed for fans and not as office spaces, the Technology Services team supporting athletics made adjustments to accommodate staff’s needs and provided technical support and equipment to ensure that work continued seamlessly. Led by Daniel Roberts, assistant IT director for athletics, the respective teams were moved to the suites in mid-January by coordinating the move of 70 lab computers into the Bright Football Complex suites and 35 plus full-time employees were moved into the suites as new offices. In addition, half of the concession area was converted into a computer lab area where the Technology Services team dedicated to athletics could assist with the technology used by each of the support units and the remaining half of the concession area was converted into a temporary dining center. 

Notable partnerships contributed to the success of this project. The collaboration between the local Open Access Lab team, and David Mooney and David Noll from the networking team led by Rudy Supak, helped ensure the computers were appropriately connected with campus servers. “Working with the OAL team was extremely easy as they were very flexible and determined in helping us find solutions for any problems that came up,” said Daniel Roberts. “In short they were great project partners for this big shift.

Adjustments were made to normal operation to account for the new space, including updating applications and reconfiguring tablets and printers to ensure continuity of both academic and dining services. All iPads managed by dining services, and typically used for gameday concessions, were incorporated into the network, ensuring dining services would continue to operate regardless of their location in the complex.

The most significant challenge was coordinating all of this work during the first week of the spring 2023 semester in order to get the office spaces ready for use and ensuring all of the units had the necessary power and bandwidth for day-to-day operations.

“I am impressed with the ease of this transition,” said Brad Barnes, Associate Athletics Director for Compliance. “The move to the suites was significantly less stressful than I anticipated thanks to the careful planning and execution of the Athletics IT team. There are certain things we take for granted–like that the computers will turn on, that the wifi will work and all those important files in the cloud will actually be there. And when we returned to the Bright Complex, our IT staff’s preparation and intense work made it possible for those of us working in our long-term but nonetheless temporary offices to move in and get back to work.”

For the hard work and success of the team, Bright Football Complex administrative leads named Daniel Roberts and his team – Josh Collins, Shem Miller, Neil Baker, Cade Bethmann, Madison Heyman, Patrick Surber, Raymond Martin and Jose Arrisola – the Texas A&M Athletics Team of the Month.

You can learn more about these team members and their role at Texas A&M University on the Texas A&M Athletics directory online.