Louisville twitter blew up on Tuesday, as the new Men’s Basketball locker room was revealed. The locker room in the KFC Yum! Center was in need of an upgrade and it happened while the team was on its three game road trip. The before and after is pretty impressive.
📸: Our locker room at the @KFC_YumCenter looked a little different before our 3-game road trip 👀👀👀#TransformationTuesday pic.twitter.com/z46elUoyhL
— Louisville Basketball (@LouisvilleMBB) January 21, 2020
Louisville basketball also put out a reveal video and the players posted videos to their social media. I looked through all of these and found some things you might have missed.
1. The Kills Board
In the beginning of the reveal video, you can see the “Kills Board” as you go into the locker room. A “kill” is when Louisville gets three defensive stops in a row.
We get a closer look at the number of kills in each game here. It looks like the numbers are done in a different color depending on if they met the target number. 7 seems to be the number of “kills” that they are looking for in a single game. I think this is a very unique element of Louisville’s locker room.
2. Illuminated Logos
The “L” logo in the ceiling is nice, but the modern “retro” logo is the star here. The illuminated logo sign above the screen is just awesome.
From this angle you can see that the logo stands out from the wall. It’s a cool little detail that ties in with the soft rebrand that the basketball team is going through with the reemergence of the retro logo.
3. Personal Safes
This is a small detail, but one that I’m sure is appreciated by the players. You can see a keypad on the right side of the upper cabinets. It looks like this is a lockable cabinet that only the player can get into. I don’t believe they had this feature in the old locker room, so this is a welcome addition.
4. NBA Jerseys
This is the lounge portion of the locker room and you can see the NBA jerseys of former Louisville players. Hopefully these will be updated with Terry Rozier’s current team and with a Warrior’s jersey for Damion Lee.
5. Exclusive Adidas D.O.N. Issue #1’s
Here you can see the Louisville basketball exclusive version of Donovan Mitchell’s signature shoe. This shoe was revealed before the Duke game last weekend.
The white shoe that you see here is a version that Donovan wore in a game earlier this season. There is a “Cardinal Head” logo on the tongue that is not visible here. This shoe is not publicly available and I’m thinking they may tie in with something that is shown later in the video. The rest of the shoes in the background are publicly available colorways.
6. Uniforms
There are a couple mannequins around the lounge area sporting full uniforms. This is the current standard uniform. You can also see a case to the left with basketballs and maybe a place for snacks for the players.
This is one of the most interesting frames. In the left corner you can see the Muhammed Ali inspired uniform debuted last year and worn this year against Florida State. In the right corner you can see another mannequin with a not so familiar uniform. We are not close enough to see details, but it is clear that it is not a uniform we have worn this year. A source tells us that all of the uniforms in this area are current uniforms, meaning that this uniform is not one from previous seasons.
This is a very blurry screenshot, but I think we can get some important information from this. We can see that the top of the shorts have two black lines with a red line in the middle and a logo that I can’t make out. We can also see “Louisville” in red and black numbers with red outlines. I think this is a new throwback uniform that the team will wear this year. It is very similar to the throwback that we wore against Duke in 2015. That uniform had gold accents and a large “dunking cardinal” logo. This uniform does not appear to have that, but there is a black logo on the shorts that you can barely see in the first picture. I think that these will be worn when Louisville hosts either Virginia or North Carolina later this year. The white D.O.N. Issue #1’s could be tied to this uniform as well.
Update:
Shout out to @Allentown615 on Twitter for pointing these jerseys out, which are available on adidas.com. It’s looks like this jersey is pretty close to what we see in the video and it may be a throwback to the 1975 season.
