As part of its 40th-anniversary issue, Athletic Business (AB) dedicated a great deal of content to looking at how recreation and athletics facilities have evolved over the past four decades. As part of that coverage, Emily Attwood from AB interviewed Reed Voorhees and Colleen McKenna about how they’ve seen campus recreation spaces specifically change, adapt and grow in that time.
Here’s the full article. Below is the section where Reed and Colleen are quoted.
“A gym is a gym, but how we treat the edges has evolved,” agreed Colleen McKenna. “The gym and the core components are still there, but the edges are much more open and soft and fluid. Both vertically and horizontally, those edges are much more transparent and therefore much more interesting. The solidity of a gym with four walls and a door was driven by function in earlier buildings. All of those edges are treated completely differently, even if the court sizes are still the same. There’s so much more vibrancy between spaces.”
Perhaps the most noteworthy addition to the core program spaces was the MAC (multipurpose activity court), making its debut in the early 1990s. Capable of serving traditional activities such as basketball and volleyball, multipurpose courts also opened the doors to new activities and not just sports. “Looking at the whole history of things, we see more and more interest in the MAC as a space that can be used for a lot of different things,” said Reed Voorhees. “They can be used for inline hockey, banquets, sleep-ins – all sorts of things. Those continue to evolve, but we see a lot of interest in those because they can be so heavily programmed.”