(Story courtesy of the Colorado College
website)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Colorado College’s
new 29,000-square-foot Adam F. Press Fitness Center will open at 3:30
p.m., Monday, March 25. The fitness center, located on the north
end of CC’s newly renovated El Pomar Sports Center, is named
after Adam F. Press, a 1984 Colorado College graduate who committed
$3.5 million toward the project.
The state-of-the-art facility includes:
- The 3,500-square-foot Smith Cardio Center with more than 50 pieces of cardiovascular equipment, including treadmills, ellipticals, AMTs, stationary bikes, rowing machines, summit trainers and stair climbers.
- A 4,500-square-foot strength training room featuring Olympic lifting racks, dumbbells, 12 pieces of selectorized strength-training equipment, additional cardiovascular equipment, a dedicated TRX training area and spaces for medicine balls, exercise balls and flexibility training.
- The 1,000-square-foot Louis Multipurpose Room, a group exercise studio for yoga and other fitness classes.
- A full-sized (94’ X 50’) recreational gym for open basketball and volleyball, intramurals and varsity sports.
- The 27-foot high Ritt Kellogg Climbing Gym, featuring 3,500 square feet of climbing surface, 24 rope stations, bouldering caves, natural cracks and a chimney/off-width area.
- One squash court and one convertible squash/racquetball court.
- Seven locker rooms, including men’s and women’s faculty/staff locker rooms, men’s and women’s student locker rooms, auxiliary locker rooms and a single-use locker room.
“I hope the fitness center will have a real multi-faceted
impact, not just as a place to work out, but to provide an element
which I think has been woefully missing,” said Press, a Los
Angeles philanthropist, investor and art collector. “The
facility hadn’t changed much since I was a student, and now,
there is much greater significance on ‘working out’ in
modern culture as both a place to work out and to socialize,”
he said.
Press has been on the CC Board of Trustees for six years, and when
he began looking for an impactful area of the college to target for
a gift, he realized, "The fitness center was ideal.”
The Adam F. Press Fitness Center is part of the $27 million renovation of the El Pomar Sports Center, located on Cache La Poudre Street near Cascade Avenue. More than 85 percent of the 2,040 students at CC are involved in some sort of physical activity, says Director of Athletics Ken Ralph, and a sports center designed to meet the fitness, recreation and sports needs of those students was overdue.
Improvements to the sports complex include a new press box and new turf for Washburn Field, new locker rooms for varsity teams and 24 new offices and four meeting rooms for athletic department staff and coaches. Locker rooms were redone, and the sports medicine facility enhanced. A total of 11,000 square feet were added to the south end of the facility, featuring a new performance gymnasium with increased floor space and chair-back seating.
Work on the project began in late 2011 with a “gateway” addition on the south side, and progressed in stages. The El Pomar Sports Center and Adam F. Press Fitness Center will be dedicated on Friday, May 3.
For information, directions or disability accommodation at the event, members of the public may call (719) 389-6607.
Colorado College is a nationally prominent, four-year liberal arts college that was founded in Colorado Springs in 1874. The college operates on the innovative Block Plan, in which its approximately 2,000 undergraduate students study one course at a time in intensive 3½-week segments. The college also offers a master of arts in teaching degree. For more information, visit www.ColoradoCollege.edu.
