Gym conversion creates fitness center

Walking through the halls of Cloquet High School last week, principal Steve Battaglia noted the pending return to school days.

"The timing always seems right," he said.

As summer waned and the $4.7 million reconstruction of the school's outdoor athletic complex neared its October completion, one project inside the building unfolded in relative quiet.

Without tearing down a wall or building an addition, the high school has a new interior fitness center thanks to ingenuity, elbow grease and roughly $15,000 in rubberized flooring.

"The space is phenomenal," Battaglia said. "This is as good a space as you're going to find, probably north of the metro area. The space is huge."

In August, Battaglia led custodians and some volunteering football players and wrestlers in converting the old high school gym into a spacious workout facility. No more will students and athletes lift weights in a dungeon within the bowels of the old school. That space was cramped and wasn't big enough to allow for physical education classes.

The new fitness center takes over the original gym from when the school was constructed in the 1960s.

Never used as a competition gym, the space had become a bit of an auxiliary gym, given the competition gym in the still newish middle school on campus and the vast gymnasium addition to the high school early this century.

"The new phy-ed standards the last couple of years have really put an emphasis on weight-training and physical fitness," Battaglia said. "Now, we can run classes with a full 30 kids in here. We were really limited prior to that."

The principal noted the contrast between the multi-million dollar project outside and the one that unfolded using vending machine profits and other petty cash revenues.

"That's how we've got to think," Battaglia said. "Every once in a while we can pull off the Hail Mary that we pulled off outside, but by and large we're going to have to nickel and dime and elbow grease our way to get there."

To outfit the new space, custodians laid the rubber matting floor while the student volunteers spent one summer night moving weight racks and equipment from the old weight room into the new space.

Battaglia is calling it the end of phase one.

"We'd probably need to spend $350,000 to convert this to exactly what we wanted, but that's not in the district's checkbook right now," Battaglia said.

Battaglia longs to see the day when 50 or more athletes are toiling and sweating away on the equipment in the room.

He said the space needs about 20 more weight racks with benches. He'd like to see a fleet of exercise bicycles so the school could conduct spin classes. He envisions a turf patch at the end of the floor where students could push weighted sleds.

He'll marshal grants, fundraising efforts and maybe even some corporate partnering to get there, he said.

Until then, students figure to be surprised by what's already in place.

"We're super excited about it," Battaglia said. "Our weightlifting program ran June and July and we didn't make the change until August, so the bulk of kids haven't seen it yet."

A quick tour of the old space revealed a hollowed-out former locker room that had been converted to a weight room in use for many years.

"It was not very awe-inspiring," Battaglia said.

But now that space, too, is an empty canvas and already teachers and programs within the school are vying to use it. Any unclaimed space in the high school becomes a precious commodity, the principal said.

Back in the new fitness center, Battaglia continued to dream big.

"My next step is to find and increase fundraising efforts to really make this state of the art," he said. "We really didn't need this gym. It was a nice luxury to have and it made sense to move into here."