Brock breaks ground on expanded fitness facility
When completed, the expanded Brock Zone Fitness Centre will be a far cry from the humble beginnings of fitness facilities at the St. Catharines university.
“We have come from having a single universal weight machine housed in a very small room back near the rowing centre doors, to a weight room in what is currently the Cage, to a bigger weight room where equipment is stored by the Bob Davis Gym, to the opening in 2002 of the current zone,” Brock recreation director Karen McAllister-Kenny said Wednesday.
McAllister-Kenny was one of the speakers at the ground-breaking ceremony for the expansion that will see the size of the facility increase to 15,500 square feet from 4,300 square feet.
“It’s a great day for Brock and a great day for the students because the present zone is full most of the time and we have to turn people away,” she said. “It was actually full when it was built and we are at 10,000 students more than when it was built in 2002.
“We just need more space.”
The expansion is being funded through a $17 per credit fee for all full- and part-time undergraduate students over a period of five years, starting in September 2020 when the expansion is completed. Last March, students voted more than 75 per cent in favour of funding the project.
Based on the 2018 enrolment, the amount of money raised will be $6.8 million, Brock University Student Union president Aidan Hibma said.
The funds are being used for the architectural and construction processes and all the equipment for the expanded facility. The architects for the facility are McCallum Sather Architects and it will be built by Aquicon Construction Ltd.
Brock’s enrolment is projected to continue to grow and any additional funds raised by the credit fee will be used to add more lockers to the expanded facility, or any other needed items as determined by next year’s incoming BUSU executive.
The Zone is projected to open in 2020 and the $17 per credit fee won’t be charged until the facility is built. The Brock board of trustees has agreed to front the costs of the expansion with an interest-free loan.
‘It doesn’t make sense for us to charge the students of today who will never see this come to completion,” Hibma said. “For us, that makes more sense.”
Faisal Hejazi, the past president of BUSU, led the referendum.
“I spent one year as VP of finance and administration and I had a really good chance to explore the university and figure out what students wanted on campus and one of the major things that I heard is that we had a really small gym,” he said. “We did the research and we found that the per square feet ratio (student to exercise space), Brock had the smallest.
“We needed to do something about it so we went to Algoma, the University of Ottawa, McMaster, Western, Lakehead and tons of other universities to compare their facilities with ours and we went and saw how they implemented their new facilities.”
The student union discovered the new facilities were funded by student referendums and decided to follow suit.
It’s money well spent in Hejazi’s eyes.
“Mental health and physical health are intertwined in many ways and aspects and students here are stressed out and want to go to the gym,” he said. “They come here (the Zone) and they have a free membership yet it is full and it’s included in their tuition fees to use the gym.
“A lot of our students were resorting to going to other gyms and paying that extra membership fee.”
