When thinking of someone who is healthy, I picture someone who eats their veggies, drinks a lot of water and goes to the gym regularly in order to keep in shape. As a college student, I feel having a well-maintained gym promotes a healthy lifestyle that will help physical and mental health. When this is taken away it negatively impacts the well-being of college students at Park University.
There are two gyms at the Parkville campus. One is in Labor Hall for everyone to use, and the other is in the Underground and is strictly for athletes. The gym in the Underground is better maintained and has better quality equipment than the gym in Labor Hall, and this just goes to show that athletes get better treatment than normal, everyday students.
The gym in Labor Hall started the school year with two benches that could be used for bench pressing. Unfortunately, one of these broke. After it broke, one would think that it would get replaced, but instead it was removed and now there is only one bench making it increasingly difficult to find a way to do any upper body exercises that require a bench.
The gym in the Underground, however, has new equipment, nice floor mats with the Park University Pirate logo, and definitely more than one bench. The problem with this gym is that it has a lock that can be opened with a key card and can only be used by the athletes.
This is a problem because there are students, like myself, who are tired of not having the proper equipment in the gym that is available to them when there is a perfectly good gym in the Underground that is never crowded – at least not when I walk by it in between classes.
A few questions that need to be asked are: why do athletes get their own gym in the first place? I know sports here at Park are important, but do they need to have the nicest gym on campus to themselves? What about the students who make use of the Warrior Center? They need a gym to use as well.
I am not saying that all of the problems with the gym in Labor Hall would be fixed by adding a new bench, but I think that this gym could be made better by updating all of the equipment and making it as nice as the athlete-only gym or allowing regular students access the athlete-only gym at certain hours of the day when the sports teams are not using it.