An update from Athletic Director Tom Kendall
Renovations to the W.F. Mitchell Athletics Centre are well under way this summer.
The renovations will bring a much-needed upgrade to the 50-year-old building, expanding it from 6,000 to 25,000 square feet. A new 170,000 square foot fitness facility will also be created at the back of the current building.
Construction officially began last November, but, according to Tom Kendall, Athletic Director, the renovations have “been in the master plan now since 2009, 2010.”
The new centre will feature a suspended running track, varsity basketball and volleyball courts, a climbing wall, new locker rooms, and several multi-purpose rooms for fitness and other recreational activities. These rooms include a cycle studio and a martial arts area.
The new facility will include a high performance centre for training, research, and injury management.
“Basically it will be a centre for training elite athletes —athletes that have national team and Olympic potential who are already in this community,” said Kendall. “I think that will be an outstanding facility for us to essentially provide a unique opportunity for athletes to access.”
Additionally, the centre will provide classroom space for the Student Athlete Mentorship (SAM) program, which pairs younger student-athletes with student-athlete mentors to provide assistance with learning strategies.
However, athletes aren’t the only ones benefitting from these renovations. The new fitness centre will also boast services and features for Gryphons fans. These features include a 2,200-seat event centre and concession areas.
“We will have an auditorium where we can host major events —not just sporting events, but convocations, exhibitions, banquets, that sort of thing,” said Kendall.
There will also be a strong emphasis on social space.
“We’ve been hearing in recent years that there are not enough places for students to go socially,” said Kendall. “We designed this building such that there would be a lot of places where they could sit and do homework or sit and socialize, but at the same time be in a facility where they could participate in a fitness and recreation program…We wanted to make this more of a campus community centre as much as a fitness and recreation centre.”
“We have a couple of designated lounges, but everywhere in the building there will be seating, couches, entertainment, TV screens, so even if you’re just sitting in a hallway, there will be seating so you can plug in your computer and do your homework, or just sit and talk to people. There will be a cafeteria downstairs in the second phase and it will become a social centre.”
Kendall hopes that the extra space will allow for more engagement with the Guelph community.
“One of the problems we’ve had about the current facility is that it’s so small,” he says. “It was built when there was 3,000 students on this campus, and now there are 22,000 students. It’s just not big enough…And so what this will do is that it will allow us to bring our alumni back, which is important to us, and it will allow us to do a little more with the community, to collaborate with them, and it also gives the opportunity to open up the fitness facility to the public in a more general way.”
According to Kendall, the project is “pretty much on time and on budget…People are getting excited about it.”
The first phase of the new Athletics Centre will open its doors in August 2016.