When space limitations began to cause problems at Purdue University’s France A. Córdova Recreational Sports Center, the school came up with a $98 million solution: make it bigger and better.
Last year, Purdue, West Lafayette, IN, celebrated the grand reopening of the 355,000-square-foot rec center, which now has triple the amount of strength and cardio equipment, an indoor hockey and soccer court, a 1,200-square-foot cycling center, climbing walls and a demonstration kitchen where students can learn about nutrition and healthy cooking.
The school already has started seeing a return on its investment, with the facility attracting 7,000 student users per day. The students are improving both their health and their GPAs (see sidebar) by working out at the rec center.
Other universities are taking note of such large-scale rec center construction and renovation projects and are going to great lengths to deliver an experience that meets students’ wants and needs and helps attract prospective students, many of whom factor a university’s recreation center and offerings into their college choice.
Students Step Up
At many universities, students are voting to upgrade their campus fitness facilities, taking on the financial responsibility of construction and renovation projects and playing a more active role in facility design and programming.
That was the case at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where the University Recreation Center was so outdated and cramped that students had started joining local gyms instead of using the center for which they already were paying, says Steve Najera, associate director of facilities.
Students voted to approve a fee increase to fund a $63.5 million renovation project in 2011, encouraged by a video highlighting campus recreation centers from across the country to show the new standard in campus recreation: fitness centers stocked with state-of-the-art cardio and strength equipment, relaxing leisure pools with fountains, lobbies and meeting areas where students can socialize, and ice rinks and turf fields for club and intramural sports.
“Are CU’s facilities adequate?” the video asked. “You be the judge.”
When the CU-Boulder Recreation Center celebrates its grand reopening next April, staff is hoping to appeal to students with features they identified as being most important, such as a new ice rink, an indoor turf training area, a wellness and athletic training suite and an outdoor aquatics facility, Najera says.
Students also were instrumental in building Auburn (AL) University’s Recreation and Wellness Center, which opened in August. Campus Recreation Director Jennifer Jarvis says students, along with staff, took on the task of educating their peers about what other universities were offering.
“Most of our students thought we had it pretty good, so we did a lot of focus groups, we loaded up students and took them to different places,” Jarvis says. “What ended up happening was that they came back a little bit embarrassed, a little bit mad and even more determined.”
In 2009, students passed a referendum that funded the $72 million facility. And after seeing what other schools had to offer, Auburn students pushed for the center to feature elements unique to the university, including a 45-person tiger paw-shaped hot tub, an outdoor courtyard located inside the building, and a five-story fitness tower, where each floor is dedicated to a different program. The 240,000-square-foot center also features a leisure pool with an aquatic climbing wall, two 50-foot climbing walls, and a 1/3-mile suspended jogging track, one of the longest in the country.
The effort to make the recreation center feel like a top-tier fitness facility does not end with the building’s features and programs; it carries over into the way staff interacts with visitors. The department now has a dedicated customer service staff that opens doors and greets students as they enter.
Although the facility was designed to make a strong first impression aesthetically, the goal is ultimately to help keep students engaged and exercising.
“We hope that by coming into this facility, they’re going to find something that they want to do,” Jarvis says. “We want them to buy into a lifetime of health and fitness.”
More Room, New Programs
At the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis-St. Paul, part of the problem with getting students in the door was finding room to accommodate them. At the original University Recreation and Wellness Center (URWC), which was built in 1993, students, faculty and staff had to sign up for 30-minute time slots to use equipment because the facility was not big enough to house the amount of equipment needed, an issue that became more problematic as the university continued to grow, says Brad Hunt, university recreation and wellness marketing director.
The limited space also forced staff to turn away students from group cycling classes and hold other group fitness classes on the basketball courts, but the new 175,000-square-foot facility, which was built as an addition to the university’s original rec building, features additional space for cardio and strength equipment, group fitness and multipurpose rooms and functional training.
Although fitness is an important part of keeping students healthy, campus recreation centers are now expanding their offerings to provide students with more than just a place to exercise, says Greg Stephenson, URWC fitness director.
“When you look at the broad scope of wellness and well-being, they want more than just the physical. They want the social, they want the spiritual,” he says. “They really wanted to create a facility that enhances that balance.”
To meet all of the students’ needs, the facility features lobbies with comfortable sofas and fireplaces where students can do homework and meet with friends. Stephenson says URWC staff also is working to incorporate more wellness services and plans to add health coaches and dieticians to the staff during the spring semester.
As recreation departments expand their buildings and mission, more universities are adding wellness programs as a way to reach more students, says Stephen Kampf, assistant vice president for student affairs and director of recreation and wellness at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Ohio.
BGSU’s wellness department moved into the university’s recreation center five years ago after a consultant pointed out that students are more likely to take advantage of wellness services that are housed in a building dedicated to health and fitness, rather than a health services building they associate with sickness. The move has had major benefits for students’ health, as well as for both departments.
“When you bring something like that into your building, it’s a new clientele,” Kampf says. “It’s not only the person who wants to work out, it’s the person who wants to be educated on wellness, on nutrition. We’ve seen a tremendous increase in our group exercise and personal training clients because of the wellness piece.”
Despite the success of the wellness services and increased traffic at the facility, the 34-year-old center could not compete with new recreation facilities, so it was removed as a stop on the BGSU admissions tour. As students have become more selective about where they choose to enroll, universities are placing greater emphasis on the admissions tour, often beginning or ending the tour at the recreation center to make a strong impression on students and their parents, Kampf says.
The BGSU recreation and wellness center may return to the tour after the completion of its $13.4 million renovation in August 2014, Kampf says. The renovation will spruce up the building, increase the space for functional training and group fitness, and add almost $600,000 worth of cardio and strength equipment for students.
Moving On Up
While many public universities have been busy renovating or rebuilding new recreation facilities over the past few years, some private schools are now seizing the opportunity to build their first recreation facilities, says Brian Ralph, vice president for enrollment management at Queens University of Charlotte, NC, a private school with approximately 2,400 students.
“We know that from an attracting standpoint, there’s been an arms race underway for the better part of 20 years now in really creating spaces that students see not only as valuable to having fun, but also a place where they can build community and connect with one another and stay fit and do all the things that recreation centers can enable them to do,” Ralph says. “Large public institutions were leaders on this front in many ways, and smaller institutions have followed suit.”
For years, recreation at the university consisted of a few basketball courts and an intramural sports program that held practices at a church field across the street from campus, but Queens celebrated the opening of the $28 million Levine Center for Wellness and Recreation in August. The 145,000-square-foot facility houses an aquatics center, a functional training area and lounge spaces.
Ralph sees the new center as both a powerful recruitment tool and a vital component of the university’s student engagement and retention strategy. By offering group fitness classes, intramural sports and other programs that foster a sense of community, the rec center will help students build relationships that make them want to come back to the university.
“We want to attract the right students to campus, and we want to make sure they have a great experience while they’re here,” he says. “It’s not about the building. It’s about what happens in the building.”
Sidebar: Research Proves Value of Recreation Centers
University recreation department leaders may have always thought they were providing students with a valuable service, but new data shows just how important recreation is to keeping students enrolled and engaged.
Stephen Kampf, director of recreation and wellness at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Ohio, says that students who entered the BGSU Recreation Center at least 10 times per year were 17 percent more likely to stay at the university than students who entered fewer than 10 times. Even after controlling for academic and demographic variables, data showed that the more often students visited the rec center, the more likely they were to stay at the university.
Data from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, also showed the positive effect that campus recreation can have on students. According to data from the spring 2010 semester, students who visited Purdue’s France A. Córdova Recreational Sports Center at least 16 times per month earned a GPA of 3.10 or higher. Those who worked out at least seven times per month averaged a slightly lower GPA of 3.06. The average GPA for Purdue students during the 2009-2010 school year was 2.86.
Although more research is needed, preliminary data about the benefits that campus recreation has on student engagement, retention and performance could encourage more universities and departments to invest in their programs, says Michelle Blackburn, assistant director for student development and assessment for Purdue’s Division of Recreational Sports.
“There hasn’t been a strong push in our field to look at how rec sports can contribute to the academic mission,” Blackburn says. “By participating in our programs and activities and being associated with rec sports, students are learning. We do support the academic mission of the university.”
Sidebar: Campus Recreation By the Numbers
Universities have been investing heavily in recreation centers since the mid-1990s, according to data from NIRSA Facility Construction and Renovation reports. But during the last decade, the number of universities building new facilities has decreased, with project costs rising and falling.
In 2004, 333 colleges and universities reported involvement in facility planning, construction, remodeling and/or expansion projects. The projects represented $3.17 billion in spending, with an average project cost of $14.2 million.
Then in 2007, the number of schools and total spending declined, with 220 NIRSA-member institutions reporting having construction projects in progress or planned, representing $3.1 billion in capital projects. But the projects were bigger and more expensive, with the average project costing $19.4 million.
A few years after the recession, construction numbers fell dramatically. In 2010, only 82 member schools had recreation construction projects planned or in progress. With 129 projects reported, the average project cost $13.2 million, and total spending was estimated at $1.7 billion.
The most recent NIRSA construction report, which was released earlier this year and includes plans from 2013 through 2018, showed that 92 member colleges have 157 projects underway or planned. The projects again represent $1.7 billion in capital spending, but the average cost is now $10.8 million.
One probable reason universities have more projects planned but are spending less per project is that instead of building new facilities, more universities are renovating or undergoing smaller-scale expansions than in years past. Only one-quarter of the reported projects involve large facilities, spaces of 100,000 square feet or greater.