Posts tagged support
CU: State-of-the-art rec center is online
Jan 10th
The University of Colorado Boulder’s expansion of the Student Recreation Center, a project initiated by students, opens on Friday, Jan. 10, at 9 a.m. The southwest addition, the second and largest phase of the project, is located just north of the Ramaley Biology Building and east of Sewall Hall and will provide an additional 83,000 square feet of indoor recreational space.
The portions opening this month include a three-level weight and cardio area; three new wood floor all-purpose indoor courts for basketball, volleyball and badminton; a climbing wall and bouldering area; three fitness studios; wellness suites; new locker rooms and a spacious entrance and lobby.
“Recreation facilities have always been extremely popular among CU-Boulder students and over the years we found that our current facilities were not keeping up with the demand,” said Chris Schaefbauer , CU Student Government tri-executive. “In surveys of our peers we found CU students participate in recreational activities at a rate higher than the national average, but that our indoor recreation and fitness space per student was lower than the national average.”
The new ice rink opened in November and the Rental and Resource Center, which will rent camping and outdoor equipment, opens in mid-February. The final phase of the project, which consists of an indoor turf field, tennis courts, outdoor pool and the renovation of the existing basketball courts, is on track for completion in April.
The $63.5 million project was funded through the sale of bonds to be repaid through student fees collected over a 25-year period. In April 2011, the CU-Boulder student body voted to support the expansion and renovation of the Recreation Center. Nearly 37 percent of eligible student voters participated in the election, the largest ever student turnout, and over 70 percent voted “yes” to increase student fees in support of the expansion and renovation.
“With this state-of-the-art addition and the significant improvements to the Recreation Center, the students and the campus community will indeed have a remarkable facility at their disposal,” said Gary Chadwick, interim director of recreation facilities. “This is certainly an exciting time for the Recreation Services staff, who are anxious to begin offering the students the numerous opportunities that this center provides.”
Students will have 30,000 square feet of state-of-the-art cardiovascular and strength training equipment, a lower-level strength area, several additional cardiovascular and stretching spaces, and a “cardio equipment green zone” that captures user energy produced during exercises to feed back into the power grid and offset some power consumption within the facility.
A 4,000-square-foot-climbing wall built by Eldorado Designs contains areas for bouldering, lead climbing and top-rope climbing. The lead and top-rope areas reach up to 38 feet. The beginner to advanced bouldering terrain reaches a maximum height of 14 feet. The northeast corner consists of shot rock and is designed as an educational area for anchor building, lead climbing and multi-pitch climbing along with gear anchor building.
Three additional multipurpose fitness studios and a mind-body studio will provide members many opportunities to participate in fitness, mind-body, martial arts, Pilates reformer and dance classes.
The Wellness Suite will provide fitness assessments, nutrition clinics, personal training consultations, and the muscular skeletal clinic. The Wellness Suite also will serve to support student success in living a healthy, balanced lifestyle.
The campus community is invited to attend “Reconnect with the Rec” Jan. 21-24. CU-Boulder faculty and staff members are invited to use the facility for free during this time. The event will provide the opportunity to experience and learn more about the southwest addition. Festivities at this free event will include personal trainers and equipment vendors on site, group exercise demonstrations, facility tours, climbing wall competitions, giveaways, snacks and more. For a full schedule of events go to www.colorado.edu/recreation.
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$143 Million Athletic Facilities Re-Design Approved By 9-0 Vote
Dec 4th
DENVER – The University of Colorado athletic department on Wednesday took its most significant step forward in two-plus decades, receiving the green light from the school’s Board of Regents to proceed with a comprehensive facilities re-design and upgrade.
The Regents voted 9-0 to approve a $143 million plan presented by Athletic Director Rick George that will:
· Add an indoor multipurpose practice facility (football field/300 meter track), whose location is to be determined. The proposed site is on Franklin Field, just east of Folsom Field’s east side. The indoor facility also would be used for tailgating on game day;
· Refurbish the Dal Ward Athletics Center, which was completed in 1991, to include an Olympic sports strength training room in the sub-basement level and new locker rooms and equipment room on the field level.
· Redesign Dal Ward’s first floor for the expansion of Olympic sports/sports medicine, a leadership development center and an end zone club with club seating and loge boxes;
· Transform the second floor of Dal Ward to increase the athletic department’s academic support system from its current 5,115 square feet to 17,200 square feet. The training table will remain on the second floor;
· Add a 21,900-square foot high-performance sports center on the northeast corner of the stadium, as well as a rooftop terrace on the northeast corner (which will generate revenue by being rentable for non-game-day events), converting the south offices at Folsom Field to retail space. The rooftop terrace is also to be used on non-game-day events.
· Also proposed for the third floor of the sports performance center are team meeting rooms. Coaches’ offices and athletic administration offices will move from their current locations at Folsom Field’s “gates” to the suite level (fourth) on Folsom’s east side.
“I’m very excited about what this will do for our program long-term,” said George, who was named CU’s athletic director on July 18 and started work on Aug. 12. “It will allow us to create a world-class, holistic student-athlete experience. It will allow us to compete for and win championships, and it will allow us to become fiscally responsible. I believe it’s a long-term sustainable model.”
He said the long-range, comprehensive plan obviously was well-received by the Regents: “Getting a 9-0 vote is very rewarding for the whole group that has worked on this.”
By the time ground is broken – hopefully this spring – on the department’s “sustainable excellence initiative,” George hopes to have one-third of the money raised. “It could be corporately, it could be an annual revenue that we generate, it could be private donors.”
Regent Steve Bosley called George’s proposal “a well-thought out business plan” that represents a large and potentially lucrative investment for the campus, city of Boulder and state. Of the possible criticism aimed at launching such a project without a large number of donations in hand, Bosley said, “That dog won’t hunt.” He said he prefers “starting with a vision and turning it into a plan.”
Close to $10 million “in actual gifts and concrete pledges” has been raised thus far, George said. “And in the last two months, we’ve canvassed all areas of the country, from our own backyard to each coast and have ‘asks’ out there in the neighborhood of $40 million more.”
While a $50 million goal initially was stated, with an early December timetable, George said that number “was never one that we had to meet by December. We are enthusiastic, focused and driven on raising the initial funds needed for the plan . . . however, it is not, and never has been, a deal-breaker to have raised the money by the first of December.”
The upgrading of CU’s facilities, said George, goes beyond potentially leveling the playing field in the Pac-12. Rather, “It’s what we should be doing for our student-athletes,” he said. “This is a significant area of need for our student-athletes. We don’t have locker room spaces, we don’t have academic spaces that our student-athletes need to be successful, to have a great experience – and we need to address that.
“We have a strength facility that’s only 10,000 square feet for 300-plus student-athletes, spirit squad, what have you. It’s a need, something we need to have for this program to be successful. Notwithstanding what other schools are doing, what they’re doing is great, but this is what we need at CU to be successful long-term.”
In attending Pac-12 Conference football games over the past several years – CU has been a Pac-12 member since 2011 – Regent Sue Sharkey said she became aware of a facilities upgrades from “seeing cranes all over the place” at football stadiums. “We need to get it done and we need to get it done now,” she said.
In addition to George’s presentation on Wednesday, the Regents heard from football coach Mike MacIntyre; men’s basketball coach Tad Boyle (via video); Kris Livingston, associate athletic director/student success; Miguel Rueda, head athletic trainer. The Regents also watch several video presentations from student-athletes in all sports speaking about their various facility needs.
MacIntyre told the board he was “excited” about the future of the university and CU football, but added, “There’s a ceiling we’ll hit in recruiting if this (the facilities upgrade) if this not done. It’s always either the first or second question I get in recruiting. He also said coaches he recruits against in the Pac-12 Conference have come into Colorado pursing in-state prospects and, because of CU’s current facilities, have questioned the school’s overall commitment to athletics. His first Buffs team finished 4-8 overall, 1-8 in the Pac-12 Conference.
Livingston told the Regents the athletic department’s academic support system’s physical resources have shrunk over the last several years from 8,400 square feet to just over 5,000 square feet. By way of comparison to another Pac-12 member, Oregon’s athletic department academic space is at 40,000 square feet. But Oregon also has nearly twice as many student-athletes as CU’s 340.
Rueda said the high performance sports center would help him and his staff better identify and treat student-athletes before minor injuries become major. The center, he added, “will allow for a program where our student-athletes will receiver world-class and holistic resources dedicated to helping them achieve.”
George said the proposal’s next phase is a presentation to architects. He hopes ground can be broken this spring, with a completion date of the 2015-16 academic-athletic year. The upgrades, he said, will put the Buffs “on par with the best out there” and will “set us up for the long-term and put an end for any Band-Aid type improvements to get us through the short-term. We’ll be set for a long time.
DAVID PLATI | ASSOCIATE AD/SPORTS INFORMATION
CU’s Mars mission off the ground
Nov 19th
successfully launches from Florida
A $671 million NASA mission to Mars led by the University of Colorado Boulder thundered into the sky today from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 1:28 p.m. EST, the first step on its 10-month journey to Mars.
Known as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, the MAVEN spacecraft was launched aboard an Atlas V rocket provided by United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colo. The mission will target the role the loss of atmospheric gases played in changing Mars from a warm, wet and possibly habitable planet for life to the cold dry and inhospitable planet it appears to be today.
“Our team is incredibly excited,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN’s principal investigator who is at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). “Everything went absolutely perfectly, exactly as we had planned when we accepted the challenge to develop this mission five years ago. Now it’s on to Mars.”
The spacecraft is carrying three instrument suites. LASP’s Remote Sensing Package will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, while the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will measure the composition of neutral gases and ions.
The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California, Berkeley, with some instrument elements from LASP and NASA Goddard, contains six instruments to characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of Mars.
NASA selected the MAVEN mission for flight in 2008. Scientists think Mars was much more Earth-like roughly four billion years ago, and want to know how the climate changed, where the water went and what happened to the atmosphere, said Jakosky, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department.
CU-Boulder also is providing science operations and directing education and public outreach efforts. NASA Goddard provided two of the science instruments and manages the project. In addition to building the spacecraft, Lockheed Martin will perform mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is providing program management via the Mars Program Office, as well as navigation support, the Deep Space Network and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
MAVEN is slated to begin orbiting Mars in September 2014. For more information about MAVEN visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/ and http://www.nasa.gov/maven.
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