Mike Bunting, associate athletic director for facility planning and management, said last year while all three departments worked on master plans for development, the athletic department discovered a way to share their facilities with the student body.
“Athletics worked on a master plan, a facilities master plan that we finished in early 2015,” Bunting said. “Once we started identifying the projects that were coming out of that initial plan, it became pretty clear that we may have some opportunities to share some space. We can’t use it 24 hours a day, right? So it’s the right thing to do to make it available to students during the off hours of athletics.”
Bunting said the three departments have been discussing the creation of a joint timetable that would allow increased facility use for EXSS in the mornings, athletics in the afternoons and campus recreation in the evenings.
“Everyone gets their priority time,” Bunting said.
Director of Campus Recreation Bill Goa said he thinks this timetable will work out for everyone.
“There was such a fitting of schedules it was almost the perfect puzzle piece,” he said.
Goa said not all universities have the same level of cooperation between departments necessary for something like this.
“It’s not very often that you get an athletic department that’s willing to share their department with students. It just doesn’t happen,” he said. “I really respect our athletic department for even participating in discussion about this.”
