NEW YORK (AP) -Jerricho Cotchery’s eyes widened while he strolled around the Jets’ new training facility and saw some of the extravagant amenities.
“You can find big screens everywhere: the weight room, walking down the hall, everywhere,” the wide receiver said Monday. “Everywhere, it’s like a players’ lounge.”
The Jets had their first day of meetings and workouts at their new headquarters in Florham Park, N.J., and spoke to the media via conference calls. The team, which will have a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday, is still unloading boxes and setting up equipment after spending the weekend moving from Hofstra University, their home the previous 40 seasons.
“It’s good, man, state of the art,” said defensive end Shaun Ellis, in his ninth season and the team’s longest-tenured player. “I enjoy being in the building now. It’s something that you look forward to coming to. I couldn’t wait over the weekend to get here. Now we’re here and everything’s been unveiled before our eyes and we’re just looking to have a good time in this building and a good season.”
The facility, officially named the Atlantic Health Jets Training Center, is on a 27-acre piece of land in suburban New Jersey located within 20 miles of the Meadowlands and Newark Liberty International Airport. It includes five full-length practice fields, an enormous, oval-shaped locker room, a nearly 11,000-square-foot weight room, 10 classrooms and 60 large-screen TVs throughout the building.
“Spacewise, if you’re going to get to meetings on time, you have to leave probably 5 minutes earlier,” safety Kerry Rhodes said with a laugh. “The facility is second to none and it’s a chance for us to get better.”
The initial plan was to have the team move in after this season, but construction was completed six months ahead of schedule. The Jets then decided to relocate during the week leading up to the regular-season opener at Miami on Sunday.
“It’s an adjustment period, but that doesn’t mean it’s a distraction,” Rhodes said. “We wanted to get in here and get into this building and have every advantage to come out and be successful this year. That’s what we did and I don’t think it’s going to be a distraction at all.”
The move comes on the heels of an exciting past few months in which the team spent more than $140 million on free agents in the offseason and traded for Brett Favre.
“I can tell you, it’s just an amazing place,” coach Eric Mangini said.
Mangini jokingly said he found his office after walking past it once Monday morning, but noticed one clear difference on his commute.
“You drive in and you see a couple of deer,” he said. “That really wasn’t something that I saw a lot coming in from Garden City.”
When someone warned him to watch out for bears, Mangini laughed.
“I hope there are no bears,” he said, “but I’m sure Brett will be excited to see the deer.”
The team, including owner Woody Johnson, has raved for months about how the new facility would give the Jets a competitive advantage. After spending the day there, the players can now see why.
“What they put into this building for us is amazing,” center Nick Mangold said. “The state-of-the-art meeting rooms, the quality of the fields, the weight room. Everything was designed with the purpose of allowing us to have better preparation and allowing us to be at the peak of our game and it’s exciting to finally be in the building after hearing about it for so long.”
The players seemed especially fond of the new cafeteria and the larger meeting rooms.
“And the projectors that we have, I believe, are some of the best, so you get a much more clear picture of when you take the wrong step,” Mangold said jokingly, “and the coach can yell at you a little bit louder because I think the acoustics are better.”
Despite all of the newness, the Jets tried to get back to regular business. The players did some film work and attended meetings in the morning and had a walkthrough to go over some gameplanning for the opener.
And, for a change, no one was in a rush to leave.
“A lot of guys are just hanging out in the locker room and just sitting around,” Cotchery said. “Usually, guys would be trying to get out of the facility and get home, but there are a lot of guys just hanging out down there now. I think everyone is just having fun with it.”
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