Walter J. Hawrys Campus Recreation Center

Fantastic experience: This recreation center offers a lot of options. Whether you just want to hit the gym or jog on a track. They fits for volleyball and basketball, as well as amazing fitness classes that make you break a sweat. Overall the facility is very incorporative and you can just do what you like to do.

Fantastic experience: The rec-center is a very adequate facility for staying in shape. Lots of room for cardio, but the weights section is generally extremely busy during the semester, at peak lines may begin to form at the weights on the first floor.

Fantastic experience: I workout here in the morning around 6am, that is when the Rec center opens up. I love that it's really quiet. The staff is super friendly and doesn't much interact with you unless you ask them a question, which is great since I don't like interruptions during my work out!

Positive experience: Reasonable gym. Lots of cardio equipment. The weightroom gets very crowded, especially in the free weights section, where there isn't really enough room for many people to use the free weights comfortably. To be fair, there aren't that many free weights either: for some reason the number of smaller weights that people use a lot (10-30 pounds) is similar to the number of heavy weights that people don't use so often (50+ weights), meaning that if the place is busy and you happen to have enough space to workout, you often don't have the weights to do it. Anyhow, more space and weights in the free weight section would definitively be an improvement. The squat cages tend to be very busy as well, better be patient if you need them. The opening hours are quite good, although it's unclear why they close earlier on Friday than on other week-days (there's plenty of people going on Friday evening --- it's clearly not for lack of demand from members). Of course, the hours are good when the place is actually open: over the past 9 months, the gym was closed for something like 15 days (not including holidays), which feels like a bit much (that's about 15 days more than what I've seen in 3 years at the previous gym I went to). The closures I saw were for maintenance, "mechanical problems" and "staff training". Those gym closure, though often clearly planned in advance, were not especially well-advertised, meaning that once in a while you just end up showing up at the gym to find the doors locked and a message explaining the place is closed for the day/week. They do post reliable closure information on their website, so I guess one can always check the Rec Center's website every time before going to the gym to avoid any surprise. The cleaning staff is nice, although their duty doesn't seem to include cleaning the training material (maybe they do it off hours, but during opening hours, they clean basically everything but the machines/weights/benches). There seems to be more than enough student-staff, since they appear to spend most of their time chatting among themselves, but they're there and they're helpful when you need them.