Lock it Up

University of Utah

The University of Utah in Salt Lake City opened a $50.4 million, 190,000-square-foot facility in late 2014, the George S. Eccles Student Life Center, and in one year's time, this state-of-the-art recreation facility has become the campus hub for fitness training, intramural sports and outdoor recreation. The Center now serves as the premier location for students, faculty and staff to gather and develop lifelong healthy habits. But the build wasn't done overnight: It took more than 10 years of planning and fundraising, said Mary Bohlig, executive director, student services.

The Center serves as more than just a recreation space, it includes a café and numerous study nooks, as well as three pools, five sport courts, 15,000 square feet of cardiovascular and weightlifting space, four fitness studios, a wellness studio and climbing walls. And lots of lockers. "In our case," she recalled, "we got to start from scratch, ground zero, rather than having to renovate. The University of Utah has a lot of commuter students, so our architects came in and did a survey on what students wanted in the new building and the number-one thing was locker rooms, which made sense because they didn't have enough space to put their stuff in during the day."

From the start, Bohlig looked for efficiency of space because she knew, with their population of students, they could not provide enough lockers. "So the locker room itself had to provide as many lockers as possible in the footprint that we could provide without giving up a lot of recreation space," she said. One of the things they did was locate lockers outside of the locker room in the hallways.

"We also asked designers for counter space with lighting, space to put their bags, and power outlets to use for whatever students would need to make themselves presentable before heading out of the building and back to class," Bohlig said.

The facility also offers private shower stalls with curtains throughout. It has two unisex rooms for either families with small children who come to the building to use the pool, or transgender students. Each area has a sink, a shower and a toilet to provide privacy.

The materials the university decided to use were basic. "We opted for red ceramic tiles to make it much more appealing rather than have cinder block, which was also colored," she said. "But it added a nice touch. We went with pressed wood lockers, rather than the old metal lockers that you had in high school." Lockers with digital locks were jamming and breaking down, so they had a firm manufacture new fronts for every single door of every single locker in the building.

"We went back to combination lock and it works like a charm. People love the locker rooms," Bohlig said. In all, the building has 33 ADA lockers, 84 day use lockers, 321 lockers rented to students for a semester, and 175 lockers rented annually for faculty and staff.