BY JOHNNY MULLIGAN
[email protected]
New facilities on campus are used as much as the weight room. At some point, almost all athletes spend time in the weight room.
Being on the football team and previously on the wrestling team, I have spent a large amount of time in that room.
The weight room is treated well by students who are on a sports team because they know how important lifting weights could potentially be to the success of their team.
The only others who use the weight room regularly are students in the weightlifting class, and they do not always treat the weight room with the respect it deserves.
Those who don’t respect to the weight room misunderstand its importance to athletic programs. It seems like many people would rather spend $39 a month going to California Family Fitness than respect the free weight room on campus.
Students might feel that because they are spending money they feel more responsible for the machines and therefore wouldn’t mess with them.
Students who spend considerable amounts of time in the free weight room form a similar attachment with the, learning to appreciate the equipment as much as students who pay for a gym membership.
Why would you treat the free equipment worse than the expensive equipment? Not everyone can afford to purchase a gym membership and the weight room is their only chance to lift, and when students ruin equipment you could take away their possible only opportunity to work out.
Roseville High School has an incredible weight room compared to most schools in the district. The facility should be treated with respect in part because if a machine is broken, there is no guarantee that it will be fixed in a timely manner or at all.
When I used the weight room for football last term, it wasn’t uncommon to see profanities written on the walls and garbage on the floor.
I have never walked into the weight room after students used it to find all weights returned to their correct spots.
The football team doesn’t clean them up every single day, but we do our best to tidy up and at least once a week clean the whole room properly.
One time while trying to lift we found that one of the machines was unusable because a student had created a trap straight out of Saw by shoving a water bottle down into the heaviest weight of the machine.
This created a hazard for students who attempted to fix the machine because they had to put their hand under 300 pounds that could drop at any moment if whoever was holding the weight up, dropped it.
You are given an opportunity to use one of the best weight rooms in the district for free, so you should treat it with the respect it deserves and show respect to the athletes who constantly use the weight room.
