By Dante Cabral
Circulation Manager
While a lot of people may not find this topic interesting, I find that it is something that I can write on and on about. Being someone who likes to workout six times a week, I believe that the Pitt Center is not that bad of a place to workout.
I typically start my weekday mornings by waking up, having some breakfast, then heading over to the Pitt Center to get my workout for the day in. While this may seem simple, there a few roadblocks that I typically hit whenever I go the Pitt Center. I believe that behind our school’s parking issue, the Pitt Center is one of the most complained about spots on campus. Here are a few things that I come across whenever I get to the Pitt Center that I think can easily be resolved.
I usually show up to the gym on the weekends at around 8:00-9:00 in the morning. Luckily, parking isn’t too bad at this time, because it tends to be so early in the morning that most students that aren’t athletes are either in class or asleep. Once I find my parking spot, I make my way down to the gym.
One of the first things I see upon arriving is which teams are working out, and how many of the squat/bench racks are reserved for the athletes (I’ll get back to the second part of that statement later.) There are some days where I get annoyed, because the athletes that are in there are taking up the equipment I need to use. While I do understand that Division l athletes get priority over students, us regular students have a schedule we need to stick to as well. We don’t have all day to wait for athletes to be done with the equipment we need to use.
Whenever I go to the Pitt to workout, I try my best to get done with my workout as soon as I can so I can free up the equipment I am using for other students to use. This, however, is kind of hard to do when racks that are unoccupied are reserved for athletes who aren’t even there yet. This is something I tend to find more obnoxious than the abysmal amount of parking we have on campus.
The reason I find this to be such an issue is because it is something that can easily be fixed. My idea to fix this issue is to write down on the sheet that the trainers place on the rack what time the athletes are coming in. This would allow students to use the rack and get as much of their workout done before the athletes need it. I feel that students being able to use a rack until a certain time period is a lot more useful and productive than just having an open rack not being used for a decent amount of time.
Another thing that bothers me is that while the racks are reserved for the athletes, the trainers at the Pitt center like to hop on the ones that aren’t reserved for the athletes. This happens to annoy me because students only have access to the racks that aren’t reserved while the trainers are the ones that put the sheets of paper on the racks to reserve them for the athletes. This issue could also be resolved by the trainers reserving one or two for themselves so that they don’t take up space that the students have access to.
You guys might not care about these issues that I have presented. You may have never even worked out at the Pitt. But these are just a couple of issues on this campus that I think can be resolved very easily. This rant will pretty much become useless whenever the new athletic center is completed on campus.
