Dylan Marinez – Michigan State University

Growing up in East Lansing, Dylan Marinez didn’t just attend Michigan State University — he lived it. As a kid, he ran the hallways of its athletic buildings while his mother and uncle worked within the department. He rooted for the Spartans on Saturdays and dreamed about a future inside the program. Decades later, he’s not just a part of Michigan State athletics — he’s helping build its next chapter, one capital project at a time, shaping the physical infrastructure that will define the program for generations.

Marinez currently serves as Associate Athletic Director for Facilities and Capital Projects at Michigan State University, overseeing the football complex, managing all major athletic capital initiatives, and coordinating smaller improvements across the department. He also acts as a key liaison between the athletic department and other campus colleges and departments, ensuring transparency, collaboration, and alignment on construction and renovation projects. It’s a role that blends operational precision with long-range institutional vision — and one that fits a career path unlike most others in collegiate athletics.

From equipment rooms to boardrooms

Before Marinez was managing multimillion-dollar capital campaigns, he was managing helmets and shoulder pads. He began his career as an intern in equipment operations with the San Francisco 49ers before landing a full-time role with the Detroit Lions. He then returned to Michigan State, where he spent more than 13 years with the football program — the last five as head equipment manager — before stepping into administration.

The pivot into facilities came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a quieter operational calendar gave Marinez the space to pursue something new. He made the most of it, reaching out to colleagues in the construction industry and learning rapidly from those already running facilities across Michigan State’s campus.

“COVID was a quiet year,” he says. “I reached out to people in the construction industry and people on campus who run our facilities. They were incredible and taught me a lot, and I learned a ton in that year.”

The transition, he says, was more natural than it might appear. Equipment management at the college and professional level is fundamentally an operations role — coordinating logistics, managing people, staying boots-on-the-ground every day. Those instincts translated cleanly into construction and project oversight. Construction is, at its core, a people business.

“It is an operations job,” Marinez says, “so translating that to construction and project management and capital projects was fairly simple.”

By 2021, he had been promoted to his current position. The pace hasn’t let up since.

Building something bigger

Michigan State’s athletic department is in the midst of a sweeping transformation. The program has launched “For Sparta,” a fundraising campaign tied to a new athletic master plan designed to elevate Michigan State into a top-10 athletic program over the next decade and a half. The goal: raise $1 billion — not through siloed, sport-specific donations, but through a unified strategic fund that directs resources where they are needed most across all programs.

The crown jewel of that effort is a planned $500 million renovation of Spartan Stadium’s east side. The project will modernize the fan experience with luxury suites, loge boxes, flexible “living room” seating areas, and multipurpose event capabilities designed to generate revenue well beyond football game days. Marinez and his team have already been meeting with dozens of stakeholders across campus to ensure the design reflects the full Spartan community — not just the preferences of any one program or coaching staff.

“We’re doing the stadium project because football is king everywhere,” Marinez says. “Putting $500 million into the stadium is going to generate revenue.”

He sees the project as more than an upgrade — it’s a declaration of where Michigan State is headed. The renovation is being designed with the College Football Playoff in mind, built to embrace cold-weather conditions and engineered with infrastructure flexibility to accommodate future technology demands. The competition for facilities, Marinez makes clear, is not going away.

“You can’t just let facilities and your campus fall apart,” he says. “You have to have a plan.”

The Spartan standard

While the stadium renovation commands the spotlight, Marinez’s day-to-day work spans the full scope of Michigan State’s athletic portfolio. A recently completed football building — finished in just 18 months, among the fastest campus construction completions on record — set the tone for how his team approaches major projects. Named in honor of Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo, the facility was funded in large part by donor Matt Ishbia. Its expansive lobby has already served as a backdrop for high-profile press conferences, signaling the kind of program-defining spaces Marinez is committed to creating across the entire department.

That building also reflects the fundamental evolution of the definition of athletic facilities. Today’s complexes are no longer simply places to practice — they are comprehensive support environments built around the whole student-athlete experience.

“We don’t just have a weight room now,” Marinez says. “We have a rehab space, a full-time nutritionist, and two mental health areas for our student-athletes.”

That philosophy extends to technology infrastructure as well. Marinez’s team has been deliberate about building flexibility into the walls — installing extra conduit and empty infrastructure to accommodate future IT and digital signage expansion. New video displays that can be updated instantly have replaced static signage, giving programs greater freedom to communicate and market to recruits, fans, and media alike.

Throughout every project, collaboration is central. Coaches get input, but the facility ultimately belongs to the institution.

“You have to find a happy medium — take care of the coach and the program but keep it true to Michigan State,” he says. “Work off the personality of the program and what works and what doesn’t.”

Rooted in what matters

For all the scale and complexity of his portfolio, Marinez stays grounded through something straightforward: the student-athletes themselves. He has watched the college sports landscape shift dramatically — NIL, the transfer portal, a financial model increasingly resembling professional sports — and he acknowledges the pace can be disorienting, particularly for younger staff members still finding their footing in a rapidly changing environment.

His advice mirrors the approach that has guided his own career: stay positive, stay curious, and never lose sight of the privilege embedded in the work itself.

Michigan State is a place Marinez has always called home. His son, a recent high school graduate, will soon continue the family tradition — heading to East Lansing to attend Michigan State and work with the football program. For Marinez, the mission has always been both professional and personal: build something worthy of the institution that shaped him and leave it better than he found it.