The Saskatchewan Roughriders will hit the field for rookie camp in two weeks at Griffiths Stadium on the University of Saskatchewan campus.

The club will use the home of the reigning Hardy Cup champion Saskatchewan Huskies for roughly two and a half weeks.

Roughriders Plaza of Honour defensive lineman Scott Schultz said facilities remain a key factor in both performance and recruiting.

“I’m a facilities guy,” Schultz said. “If I were on this team now, if I spent any more time in the stadium, I’d be a stand or a chair. I would spend all my time at the stadium using the facilities, the hot tub, the cold tub, the treatment, everything that’s there.”

Schultz pointed to Mosaic Stadium as a benchmark across the CFL.

“You look at the facility that they have now; it is state-of-the-art,” he said. “There’s no one in the CFL that has a comparable one. Mosaic Stadium is just an unbelievable, state-of-the-art facility with amenities for these players.”

He added players entering the CFL now arrive with expectations based on their collegiate experiences.

“They expect those kinds of amenities,” Schultz said. “When I came from the University of North Dakota, they had a big facility like a field house. They had four fields, a pool, and a warm-down pool you could walk through to cool down your legs. You had 24-hour access.”

Schultz said he often took full advantage.

“So many times, I was in there at one in the morning watching film — Betamax back then, because it had better quality,” he said. “I was like a kid in a candy store.”

The Moose Jaw product said that experience shaped his understanding of the importance of facilities to development.

“I spent five years in North Dakota coming from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and to get into a facility like that, it was just fantastic,” he said. “That’s the kind of experience everything’s moved to now.”

Schultz added that the evolution of facilities continues to raise the bar across football.

“You see some of these universities now, it’s ridiculous,” he said.

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