The University of Minnesota recently completed a $60 million expansion project that added a 175,000-square-foot building to its Campus Recreation and Wellness Center (CRWC), more than doubling the size of the original facility.
The new building, which is connected to the university's original recreation center and aquatics center, opened to students, faculty and staff last month. Funded through increased student fees, the CRWC provides a solution to a decades-long space issue.
In the original facility, 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 accommodate 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 building features seven multipurpose rooms that house group fitness classes and a theater-style group cycling studio. The CRWC also includes a suspended jogging track, a 38-foot climbing wall and a bouldering wall.
"We were really missing the mark with the facility that we had," Hunt tells Club Industry. "Moving into designing this facility, we really designed it to have enough fitness space, enough cardio space, enough strength training space for the university community to really meet that mark."
The CRWC usually averages 2,500 visits per day, but that number has increased to 5,500 visitors per day since the expanded facility opened, Hunt says.
"We knew there would be a positive reaction to it, but we didn't know it would be this overwhelmingly positive," Hunt says. "Twenty years later, we're finally feeling like we're a little more right-sized for the type of campus that we have and for the size of campus that we have. We're excited to see what the future holds."