This upcoming week gives Fountain-Fort Carson High School and the city of Fountain a chance to strut.

While the University of Colorado’s football team will rest at University of Colorado Colorado Springs’ campus during its weeklong training camp, Fountain-Fort Carson High School will serve as the Buffaloes’ headquarters.

Trojan Arena, Fountain-Fort Carson’s $40 million gym with a near 5,000-seat capacity, will act as CU’s meeting space from Sunday through the Buffs’ final day of camp Aug. 8. The Buffaloes will also have the facilities at Guy R. Barickman Stadium at their disposal.

“This is a cool thing for our community and for our campus,” Fountain-Fort Carson football coach Jake Novotny said. “ … I don’t say this to sound arrogant, but it’s a very short list of high schools that could handle something of this caliber for a full week. You come on to our campus and see an arena that was a $40 million investment and has several meeting rooms and meeting spaces. There’s an on-campus football field that has everything you need. Every field on our campus is turfed. You have an operations team in our district who are more than willing to do these types of events.” 

“ … It’s cool to see our operations team — and they do this every day — come together and work efficiently and effectively to host an event of this magnitude.”

CU’s practices, which are closed to the public, won’t disrupt the Trojans’ routine as Fountain-Fort Carson players will practice in the afternoon.

“We’ll go an hour or two after they’ve cleared out, which is our normal practice time,” Novotny said. “We do that every year because that’s when we start going back to work and back to school and we want kids getting back on that fall schedule.” 

One caveat that affects Trojan athletes is August is a dead period for recruiting. Per the NCAA’s recruiting guidelines, a dead period is:

“A period of time when it is not permissible to make in-person recruiting contacts or evaluations on or off the member institution’s campus or to permit official or unofficial visits by prospective student-athletes to the institution.” 

“In terms of our student-athletes, there’s not going to be much interaction,” Novotny said. “At the same time, we don’t want to be a distraction nor do they want to be a distraction for our student-athletes who are starting practice around the same time.” 

While that’s a bummer, Novotny, who spent time as a Division II assistant coach at Colorado State University Pueblo, said he understands and recognizes coaches can still extract tidbits from CU’s visit to share with Trojan players. 

“What’s cool is having those experiences and seeing it at the Division I level,” Novotny said. “All the pieces and all the areas: strength and conditioning, nutrition, operations, logistics, security and seeing how all of that works. You see how you can take some of that, scale it down to the high school level and use that down the road for planning purposes for our team when we travel or when we travel to camps or our own fall camp. How do you take what you’re doing now and intertwine it?”

The Trojans, who finished 8-4 last year, open with a Zero Week road contest against Chaparral at 7 p.m. Aug. 20 and have four of their first five games away from Guy R. Barickman. Fountain-Fort Carson will battle for its seventh consecutive year at .500 or better.