The Daily Orange

Media Credit: Stephen Dockery [Click to enlarge]

Media Credit: Stephen Dockery

Matt Jordan no longer exercises at Archbold Gymnasium during peak hours. The fitness centers are too crowded, machines such as ellipticals are rarely available and the sign-up system is inefficient and easily abused.

Instead, he and his roommate now try to go to a fitness center after 8 p.m. By then the crowds have died down, more machines are available and they don't have to deal with people cheating the sign-up system.

"I don't have any complaints with Goldstein," said Jordan, sophomore philosophy major, who also said the sign-ups are inefficient. "With my experience, I've abused the system. It's the best they can do."

He mentioned that some students sign up for half an hour and never show up, remain on the equipment for longer than they signed up for or simply sign up under different pseudonyms.

"There are some great programs at SU," said Charles Giannone, senior mechanical engineering major. "But when it comes to recreation, it's lacking there."

Many students complain that the recreational facilities at Syracuse University are crowded, outdated or inefficient, though approximately 1,000 people use Archbold every day, and about 25 to 50 people use the satellite recreational facilities each day, said Joseph Lore, associate director of SU Recreation Services.

"The only problem I have with Archbold is it gets really crowded from 2 to 10 p.m. every day," said Bridget Schultz, freshman public relations major. "It's very hard to manage your time to work on certain machines."

Besides being crowded, some students feel that the facilities themselves need to be expanded.

"It's just so small in Goldstein," said Lynne Vasconcellos, senior English and political science major. "It doesn't really feel like a gym. It's so small that if I move, I'm hitting the person next to me."



Stacking up

During the last couple years, a group of students and staff, under the auspices of the Division of Student Affairs, visited other colleges and universities with newly built or renovated fitness facilities.

The group includes Barry Wells, dean of student affairs; Jean Steffes, associate vice president of student affairs; former Vice Chancellor Deborah Freund; Mitch Gartenberg, director of recreations services; then-Student Association President Wayne Horton and representatives from planning, design and construction, among others.

Horton, who visited the University of Houston in October 2006, said the recreation center there had "anything you could possibly imagine," including an Olympic-sized swimming pool, high dive, an indoor track, a climbing wall and floor hockey.

"It's a paradise for anyone who's athletic," Horton said. "It definitely whetted our appetites … SU is definitely in dire need of new recreational facilities."

Though Horton only visited the one school, other members of the group have visited schools such as Northeastern University, the University of Illinois, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Georgia, Gartenberg said. The visits were primarily to gather facts on how the projects were funded, carried out and the details of what the facilities contained.

Archbold has 10,000 square feet of usable fitness facility, complete with cardiovascular machines and weights.

Other schools with more recently built fitness centers, such as Hamilton College, Boston University and Georgia State, have fitness facilities with 30,760; 18,000 and 16,000 square feet of fitness area, respectively, according to their corresponding Web sites.

Georgia State, in particular, has striking ties to SU. Before coming to SU, Gartenberg was integral in helping facilitate the building of a new student recreation center there, as associate director of recreation services from September 1998 to September 2000.

The project, which in total cost $33 million, was conceptualized and carried out between 1997 and 2001, before the grand opening, which Gartenberg attended.

"It's been a real drawing card for new students, and current students see this as a fantastic resource while they're here," said John Krafka, assistant director of recreational services at Georgia State. "Now it's a center where they feel that they belong to the university … it's really improved student life."

Up to 2,400 students a day pass through the revolving doors of the facility, which was completely funded by student fees, Krafka said. In the mid '90s, the university president asked the then-director of campus recreation to start an educational campaign to take student leaders to various high-quality recreational facilities at other schools.

From that effort, a student referendum was drafted, voted on and passed, that announced each student would pay a fee that would be pledged directly to the building of a new student fitness center. To build the new center, the university sold bonds, which will be paid off by future student fees, Gartenberg said.

"I think students were immediately very proud of what we had," Krafka said.

The four-story building, which takes up half a city block in downtown Atlanta and is 161,000 square feet large, includes many amenities not found at SU. These include an indoor multi-purpose court, used for soccer, handball, basketball and badminton; a 1/8 mile indoor track and 16,000 square feet of fitness area with treadmills, elliptical machines, exercise bikes and free weights. It also includes a 35-foot climbing wall; four racquetball courts; one squash court and an aquatic center with an eight-lane lap pool, a leisure pool with zero-depth entry, and a Jacuzzi and sauna, among other things, Krafka said.

The facility also has a game room equipped with pool tables, ping pong, video games and dartboards. The center also includes four Internet stations, a plasma television and three studios used for activities from dancing to kickboxing.

Gartenberg said he would like to see many of these amenities in a potential new fitness center at SU in the next few years.



Short-term remedies

In order to accommodate students and improve the efficiency of SU's recreational facilities, some short-term remedies have already been considered.

"Short term remedies are in the pipeline," Gartenberg said. "There is an understanding that we need more."

"We're looking at an expansion of fitness facilities this fall," Gartenberg said. "We believe that will help in the near term."

A new fitness facility space may be opened in the fall of 2007, though it has not yet been signed off on because of issues surrounding the contracts.

"To my knowledge, we're not quite ready to announce the location. A few more details need to be worked out," said SU spokesman Kevin Morrow in an e-mail. "There is a committee working on near-future solutions involving distributed fitness facilities … one aspect of this is fitness space proposed to be available for the fall 2007 semester and also fitness facility plans for the new residence hall that will open in 2009. None of this is at a point that we are ready to discuss logistical details."

For the fall of 2009, a new fitness facility will be built as part of the new residence hall project at 619 Comstock Ave., near DellPlain Hall, Gartenberg said.

The 10,600-square-foot "state-of-the art facility with windows and televisions" will include 8,600 square feet of fitness facilities with machines similar to the ones at Archbold, Lore said. It will also include 2,000 square feet of a low-ceiling, multi-purpose room. The multi-purpose room will be used for anything from dance classes to karate.

"We're moving forward," Lore, associate director of SU Recreation Services, said. "There's a great deal of importance placed on services outside of academics. I believe we're in a forward motion. People realize they can't be built overnight."

Recreation Services also has attempted to remedy the short-term considerations of SU's recreational facilities by offering long hours for students to exercise in the recreational facilities, by providing fitness classes and having late night at the gym, Gartenberg said.

While the fitness center located in Marion Hall is now closed from 1 to 4 p.m., Gartenberg said that in fall 2007, it will either be open during that time or will be open later.

"We try to compensate the best way we can with our space limitations," Gartenberg said.

The equipment is fixed weekly, or whenever it is needed, Lore said. Also, he said Recreational Services only purchases "commercial, high-end equipment."



Long-term goals

Besides possible discussion of a new facility in the fall of 2007, and the discussion and planning for the new fitness center in fall of 2009 near DellPlain Hall, a small group of faculty and staff exists to discuss possibilities for a completely new fitness center in the future.

"There's an understanding that we need to improve," Gartenberg said.

But funding will be a huge obstacle to overcome before a new facility is built, since SU would have to take out loans and increase its debt, Gartenberg said. Also, the fact that various other construction projects are currently in the works may hinder immediate administrative approval.

"At SU, we currently have a lot of construction going on," Gartenberg said. "Even if students agree to do it, I'm not sure SU could."

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools