Weston Ranch High School has installed a new weightlifting/athletics gym for its students. The gym is in the high school’s agriculture department, which is towards the back of the high school. The gym is open to students only participating on athletic teams at the current time.

Now we see why they would do that, but is that honestly fair? To use the school gym, you must commit to joining an athletic team, but joining a sports team isn’t an option for a good majority of the students.

We can understand that it’s to maintain the care of the equipment since everything is relatively new, but it’s like buying a pair of shoes only to wear once every month. Eventually, it will wear out. We also understand that safety of the users is vital and would require student orientation to make sure equipment is used properly.  But, is the school telling non-athletes that team sports athletes are more responsible with new equipment?

A fix to that controversy should allow all students interested in physical fitness to use the equipment on the Weston Ranch campus. The new facility would need a responsible adult to watch over the equipment and supervise the students. Weston Ranch has a teacher-supervised study hall, so why not a teacher-supervised fitness facility?

The gym has a collection of bars that I believe are not the standard 45-pound Olympic bars but are, as a matter of fact, lighter. Along with the bars, the gym also has bumper plates, jump ropes, box jumps, and a pull-up section within the bench press area. Overall, it’s a solid gym that would get the work done, and it has a variety of tools that can be of use. The sheer size of the gym is good when you think of a school gym, and it is an excellent addition to the WRHS campus.

A state-of-the-art fitness facility is great for our sports teams. The overall benefits of a dedicated sports training facility will help build more robust and more physically fit athletes. However, when it’s not in use, how do the rest of us benefit?