Spurs Sports & Entertainment is bringing together researchers in a new 60,000-square-foot medical office building to study elite human performance.
Construction workers broke ground on the new building, located near La Cantera and The Rim on Loop 1604, in September 2025 with plans to wrap up construction by the end of September this year.
The Spurs’ vision is to bring together researchers from UT Health San Antonio, Southwest Research Institute and Liminal Collective, a performance company that works with professional athletes, performers, military special forces and businesses to optimize talent. Another goal of the project is to take what’s learned about elite performance and apply it to health insights for everyday people.
“Our primary core business here is basketball, but layered on to that, what can [the players] help us understand about ourselves?” said Phil Cullen, associate vice president of basketball organizational development for the Spurs. “Can we take those learnings and then help create opportunity services programs here for San Antonio to help our public health care system as a whole?”
The Spurs opened the $500 million, 45-acre campus in 2023 called The Rock at La Cantera. It contains the organization’s new practice facility, event venue space and restaurant and a gift shop. A parking garage will also be built next to the building.
Originally part of its phase I opening, which wrapped up in 2023, plans for the Human Performance Center were interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘First of its kind’
Human performance, or performance science, is a multidisciplinary field that incorporates physiology, sports science, biomechanics and psychology to understand and improve talent and performance among elite athletes, artists, Fortune 500 CEOs and military special forces.
Australian native Andy Walshe has been in the field for decades. He has worked with the U.S. Olympic ski and snowboard teams, Australian sports organizations training athletes for the Olympics and Red Bull. While at Red Bull in 2012, he led the performance plan for skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the stratosphere, setting numerous world records and becoming the first person to break the sound barrier in a free fall.
Today, Walshe heads the performance company he helped start in 2019, Liminal Collective. The Spurs have brought along Walshe and his team to work alongside other researchers at the organization’s new center.
“No one’s ever aggregated these communities like this around common problems in this space,” Walshe said. “So it’s a first of its kind for San Antonio [and] for the world.”
The Spurs are planning to fill the remaining space in the three-story building with health, tech and biomedical companies or startups.
“We’re trying to fill this building,” Cullen said. “We’re looking for tenants that want that alignment and vision around human performance.”
According to Walshe and Spurs Owner R.C. Buford, the Pentagon might be involved in the research hub as well, aiming to study the performance of its cyber workforce. When contacted, the U.S. Department of War said it had no information to provide.
UT Health San Antonio will be the main tenant, occupying one third of the space.The university confirmed in an email it was still evaluating specific programs and timelines.
Patrick Kaminski, vice president and chief strategy officer for UT Health San Antonio, said the public university hopes the collaboration and research at the hub will translate advanced human performance science insights into “better health outcomes for the broader community.”
The Spurs will mostly be interested in applying the collaborative research conducted in the new center to optimizing performance of its players, through psychological insights that can help players maintain performance and composure during the final minutes of playoff games, for example.
And even the biomechanics of movement to understand injury prevention and performance of star basketball players like Victor Wembanyama.
“The Spurs are going to [ask] what have you learned about the brain?” Walshe said. “What have you learned about rehab? What have you learned about the biomechanics of the basketball shot? They’re definitely interested in biomechanics because of Wemby’s size and structure. The guys are all getting bigger … they want to know how to optimize movements without injury.”
Such research is already happening in conjunction with Southwest Research Institute and UT San Antonio, Cullen said, but the new center will bring more resources and experts together to tackle unanswered questions in human performance science.
Buford says the research also offers an opportunity for UT San Antonio to apply those learnings into improving what we know about public health.
“What we learn about elite performance in an individual can be translated to teams, to organizations, and then can be scaled to communities,” Buford said.
