Alumni Gym to become recreational hub next Fall

What do 100 person Zumba classes, women’s volleyball and Quidditch have in common? They are all offered by St. Edward’s University Campus Recreation and are all more fun with air conditioning.

The Alumni Gym, home of Campus Recreation, will undergo renovations starting in November. When it reopens in Fall 2014, the gym will be air conditioned and offer more space, updated electricity, insulation and a new roof.

Andy Lemons, director of Campus Recreation, is looking forward to the new accommodations.

“One place that I don’t think we’ve ever had is a place to congregate and recreate,” Lemons said. “We have always had to program something.”

The new building is focused on the recreational side of athletics, where students can shoot hoops or just hang out. Club teams, such as basketball, volleyball, and the dance team, can also use the gym floor.

Additionally, there will be a fitness assessment room, which is a private setting to get a progress report on your body.

“We can do strength, cardio, BMI, which is body mass index, body fat testing, and flexibility testing,” Lemons said.

This room provides an educational aspect to exercise and the lens of facts with which to approach your personal fitness goals.

However, the proposed fitness room has caused controversy as the space was previously lent to the theatre program, another department badly in need of space.

Lemons insists that this will be the only department affected.

“Other than the theatre department, no one else is being relocated out of there,” Lemons said.

IT support will continue to keep their offices in the new gym, along with offices for club sport officers, Lemons and his new assistant Clint Jones.

This new recreational gym was selected for renewal as part of the Facility Master Plan, in an effort to renovate old facilities instead of building new ones.

The gym was selected to save money, campus land, and preserve the building’s unique history.

“That’s a cool building,” Lemons said. “The brothers and our old president literally went and laid the bricks. You don’t want to tear something like that down.”

The cost to refurbish the building remains unknown, but Lemons said University Federal Credit Union made it possible with the largest corporate gift in St. Edward’s history.