The laundry room at an NFL practice facility is the nerve center for that NFL team. Without it, the daily life of the organization wouldn’t be able to run. Every day that players, coaches and staff are working, there is laundry being produced, especially on practice and game days. From the weight room, the training room, the practice fields and the locker room, all the laundry is collected and brought back to this key area to get cleaned, sanitized and put back out for the next day.
NFL teams use industrial size washers and dryers to get the job done in the laundry room. These are required because of the massive amount of laundry that need to be done to keep an NFL team going. During the peak times, such as training camp, NFL teams are washing laundry for sometimes over 200 people daily. An average household in the United States does less than 50 lbs of laundry a week, while an NFL team could be doing over 120 times that with as much as 6000 lbs of laundry in one week possible!
NFL Equipment Managers become experts in getting garments and equipment cleaned. This requires them to know how to get everything from grass stains out to the “burn marks” left sometimes from rubber infill turf fields. Whether it’s practice clothing and unforms or game uniforms that are being seen on TV by a nationwide audience, an Equipment Manager takes pride in having everyone look their best. This can mean sometimes washing things multiple times, soaking them in special cleansing baths, or applying a little elbow grease by hand scrubbing particularly difficult stains.
NFL teams are very careful to make sure that everything is cleaned and sanitized before putting all the items back out to their owners. Equipment Managers work with industry leading companies to make sure that the products they are using to clean the laundry are easily and effectively working to not only get the laundry clean but to completely sanitize anything in the wash. The sanitization in the wash cycle is an important step and just another reason that the laundry room is an very important part of an NFL facility.