The Fighting Irish football team now has access to a hyperbaric chamber, cold tubs, an infrared sauna and red-light therapy, among other amenities. It’s all inside the new 150,000-square-foot Jack ’83 and Kathy Shields Family Hall that opened during the summer northeast of the Joyce Center.
The new football HQ’s features include a sports performance center for athlete fitness and injury prevention, a sports medicine facility, a new locker room, auditoriums, an augmented reality walkthrough room, a barber shop, academic support space and a large training room. A shared dining area will serve all varsity student athletes. Notre Dame symbols appear throughout: touches of gold, Notre Dame Stadium brick, and the “Founder’s Lines” from the stadium’s end zones, which accent the locker room.
“It’s unbelievable,” head coach Marcus Freeman told reporters in August. “It serves our players in a way they’ve never been served before and they deserve it. . . . They have the best of the best. Everything.”
For 21 seasons, the football program was based at the Guglielmino Athletics Complex, which will remain, receive upgrades and continue serving the University’s other varsity athletic teams.
Mod Quad is home to Notre Dame’s newest living roof. Over the summer, crews installed a green roof atop Pasquerilla West Hall, making it the first campus residence to receive a full green roof. (Alumni and Farley halls have greenery, mostly a variety of species of sedum, on small, flat sections of their roofs.)
Beginning with the Morris Inn in 2009, the University has added more than 212,000 square feet of green roofing — almost 6 acres in total — across 13 campus buildings, bringing environmental benefits that include diminished stormwater runoff and reduced energy use for heating and cooling. The Joyce Center’s green roof, spanning nearly 2 acres, remains the largest green roof in Indiana.
Notre Dame’s six-wheeled food delivery robots are no more. The fleet of diminutive automatons from Starship Technologies vanished from campus in June, having been a familiar sight on campus sidewalks since 2023, when the University launched a delivery service that allowed students and employees to order food from campus restaurants via the Grubhub app.
Starship operated some 1,200 food-delivery robots on more than 60 U.S. college campuses before ending those services this year. The company says it plans to redeploy the robots. “We’ve made the decision to wind down our U.S. campus operations as we shift our strategic focus to retail grocery chains and hot food delivery in cities across Europe and the United States,” a Starship spokesperson told The Observer.
No word on whether Notre Dame will seek an agreement with another on-campus food delivery service. In the meantime, students and employees may retrieve meals and snacks the traditional way, via foot power.
A report released in July by Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life offers 12 recommendations to improve Catholic seminarian formation. The recommendations call for more effective deployment of mental health services, offer new guidelines for candidates with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder and other special needs, and encourage support for the demands of chastity and celibacy.
The report further recommends that candidate screening and formation processes be strengthened to prevent the ordination of unstable or unfit individuals. It urges bishops and rectors to focus on readiness and vocational quality, rather than on increasing seminary numbers.
According to survey data in the report, 22 percent of Catholic bishops in the United States are “comfortable ordaining a man who experiences deep-seated same-sex attraction, provided he is firmly committed to celibacy,” while fewer seminary rectors and vocation directors feel the same level of comfort. Another 45 percent of the U.S. bishops consider same-sex attraction, by itself, “disqualifying” regarding candidacy for the priesthood.
The document was written by Father Thomas Berg, a visiting professor of the practice at McGrath, and Timothy Lock, director of psychological services at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, and founder and director of the Goretti Center for Healing and Forgiveness.
In June, Father John I. Jenkins, CSC, ’76, ’78M.A., the University’s president emeritus, was announced as the 2026 recipient of the Centennial Award, a biennial honor that Commonweal magazine, the nation’s oldest independent, lay-led Catholic opinion journal, established in 2024 to celebrate its 100th anniversary.
The award recognizes prominent leaders whose work informs the Catholic faith and serves the common good. Fordham University President Tania Tetlow was the inaugural recipient.
In announcing the award, Commonweal editors wrote that Jenkins has “demonstrated an unwavering commitment to higher education, civil discourse and ethical considerations of the most pressing issues of the day” while working to enhance Notre Dame’s influence within higher education, the Church, the United States and the world at large. Ellen Koneck, the magazine’s executive director, referred to Jenkins as “a towering figure in American Catholicism today.”
Jenkins will formally receive the award at a benefit dinner in October in New York City.