Rachael Deegan | The Scribe
Taylor Garcia
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The Rec Center added 43,085 square feet onto the original building with its expansion, and with the start of the semester the improved center opened its doors.
Boasting changes that include a larger, more versatile workout center, two new basketball courts and a new athlete weight room, the addition was student-funded through two separate fees approved by students in 2012 and 2014. $16.3 million was put into the new center.
If you haven’t been able to go, I would recommend it.
The new addition is clean-cut and expansive. The basketball courts are constantly filled with pounding of the basketball and trash-talking. 
Rachael Deegan | The Scribe
The upstairs is much quieter. The new workout area is huge. It’s 14,900 square feet, including a new free-weight area, a machine area and new cardio machines. To be honest, it looks almost like Lifetime Fitness.
“It’s nice. It makes me want to work out more and it’s a good place to meet new people,” said Charlie Botnick, a sophomore majoring in communication.
The new upstairs workout area is beautiful and any weightlifter’s dream, but everything is spread out. In fact, it is so spread out it is as if there are two different workout areas, a new one and an old one.
The two areas are connected by a long hallway that has a new stair-stepper but, like always, one of them is out of order. There are so many new treadmills and new areas to stretch and do abdominal workouts, but again there is an abundance of empty space.
The one persistent issue is the fact that the building is freezing. No matter where you are in the facility, it is cold. Even after 40 minutes of playing intramural basketball, I was freezing in the new gyms.
The track is still intact and is often in use. The older gyms have a volleyball net set up on one court and one open for basketball.
The only lockers offered are on the old side of the Rec Center, but the new side is the main entrance. Naturally, visitors who want to work out don’t want to walk all the way to the other side to put their stuff away.
It is a nice facility, but I hope that in the future more equipment will be added. In addition, expanding the upstairs to become one large room would make the area more cohesive for the entire facility.
In my opinion, the expansion was a good investment. It adds to our campus and accommodates the growth UCCS has been seeing. It will become a point of pride for our campus in the years to come.