A new piece of interactive equipment, the Nexersys full-body training unit, will arrive at the Campus Recreation Center during the first week of April.
“The opportunity for wellness on campus has just gone through the roof,” said Dean Bowen, the assistant director of Fitness & Wellness Programs for Campus Recreation.
The Nexersys will feature a 22” LCD touch screen monitor for easy menu navigation, surrounded by seven strike pads on an adjustable frame. “It can tell you what to do, it’ll time what you do, it can tell you how you did, or your accuracy,” Bowen said.
Users will be able to save their profile and workouts on a USB flash drive, choose from multiple training levels and receive real-time summaries of their performance, among other features.
After 13 years of planning and construction, the Campus Recreation Center opened in Fall 2012. All full-time undergraduates pay a Student Membership Fee with tuition, granting them automatic membership at the center during semesters they are enrolled in.
“I see the usage increase week by week. We’re excited as professionals to see the students utilize the center,” Director of the Department of Campus Recreation Jay Souza said. “It’s here for them, so everyone’s real happy it’s a good place that students can go and socialize.”
The growing audience of students and large floor space permits the center to stay on top of the growing demand in fitness on campus and to keep introducing state-of-the-art equipment to the student body, who did not have the same fitness opportunities two years ago.
“It’s exciting to walk in here everyday and see the activity, see the life this building has brought to campus,” Bowen said of the one-and-a-half-year-old Campus Recreation Center.
The Campus Recreation Center is an improvement of the fitness center once located in a 3,500 square-foot room in the Student Activity Center.
“We were lucky if we pushed over 750 to 800 people a day,” Bowen said about the SAC. “But now, here we are—2,800 people a day is nothing.”
According to Dr. Susan DiMonda, the former director of Campus Recreation and the current director of Student Life, the university now has new sports clubs that could not function before the creation of the Campus Recreation Center.
The center also increased opportunities for student employment. “We’re always getting people coming in looking for jobs. Right now we employ a little bit over 200 students,” Durron Newman, Campus Recreation’s assistant director of Student Personnel & Marketing, said. “We don’t have a high turnover, usually students stay until they graduate.”
The growth of the Department of Campus Recreation shows no sign of slowing down. “The Campus Recreation South Field Complex will open this spring,” DiMonda said. “We’ll be having a ribbon-cutting ceremony in April.”
Bowen said the Campus Recreation Center will continue to be a popular student space. “We’re always looking to stay on the cutting edge of everything, that way we can offer the absolute best to our members and to our students.”
