The luxurious locker room once home to the Oklahoma football team inside the Barry Switzer Center met its demise this summer.
The Switzer Center was demolished as a part of OU’s stadium renovation project, which forced the team to move across Jenkins Avenue to a temporary locker room facility.
OU’s new quarters are more cramped, not as glamorous but as smelly as one would expect for a football team’s dressing room.
Oklahoma has done as much as it can to replicate the same experience, however, senior Charles Tapper said it's brought the team back to reality.
“It’s going to make you hungry,” Tapper said. “We don’t have that big, lavish, lovely, home-feeling living room. It’s now just a grind. Now we get to feel the struggle the other team is feeling. It’s not bad as the visiting locker room, but it’s not as great as the old locker room,” he said.
The senior defensive end said the team’s more humble locker room situation has made the team less complacent.
OU’s old locker room was one of the best in the country. However, the seven-time national champions temporarily downgraded while the south endzone of Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium undergoes construction.
“It’s a little bit tighter,” Tapper said. “It reminds me of a Texas high school locker room. We kind of took a step back. It brought us back to reality that everything is not given. You got to go out there and take what you want.”
However, the downgrade brought the team closer together in more ways than one.
Senior receiver Durron Neal isn’t bothered by the temporary relocation. It’s helped him get to know and talk to more teammates than before.
“I feel like it brought us together,” Neal said. “We’re in a small space now. Some guys, if you don’t talk to them on a normal basis, you got to get to know more. I feel like it’s made us come closer as brothers."
The change will bring a better locker room to future Oklahoma teams.
Senior center Ty Darlington won’t get to enjoy the life of locker room luxury in his last season in Norman. However, he understands the change is necessary.
“It’s not quite what I’d choose for my last six months as an Oklahoma Sooner,” Darlington said. “It does sort of give you some perspective, though, because what we were in before was built by the guys before us.”
