“With the iPads on the walls, things will move a lot faster,” John Lampe, football player and senior, said of the high-end technology in CHS’s newly constructed fitness center.

While there will not be Apple iPads built into the walls, more computers and possibly tablets will be features of the new fitness center, according to Kevin Wright, head football coach and advanced physical conditioning (APC) teacher. Wright said the new devices will help physical education teachers speed up the process of collecting data for their classes.

According to Lampe, other useful features include a floor dedicated to weight and cardio training and a basketball court on the second floor with a suspended track.

Wright said plans for construction began in 2005, but according to Assistant Principal Doug Bird, construction couldn’t be completed until recently because of the funds that a “top-of-the-line” center required.

According to Wright, the center is long overdue and will help overcome the limitations of the older technology CHS used to have.

“Our health classrooms are in the academic wing, so unless you go to the academic wing, there’s not much technology to be used in health. We use watches and heart rate monitors to get a lot of our fitness data, so we don’t have much,” he said. “With the APC classes, there’re (more than) 80 students, and we have two computers. When every kid gets to sit down and put their information in, if they each take a minute and a half, that takes us two days. It’s very time-consuming and cumbersome.

However, Wright said physical education teachers could use the new equipment to develop lesson plans and workout plans as well as find target areas, strengths and weaknesses much more quickly than they could before.

“Taking a class of forty students into the cardio room, putting them onto a piece of equipment, having them work out for 20 minutes and having that information sent back to you—(the new technology) has the capability to graph the whole class and find out where each person falls in regards to how far they went or their average heart rate,” he said. “It creates data that is really difficult to obtain just using watches and heart rate monitors.”

Wright also said he hoped the interactivity of the new equipment would excite students and interest them in physical fitness, especially since the cardio equipment now includes screens with scenery that moves as users move and the capability to have users design workouts and track progress.

“It’s not always fun to just get on a treadmill or run around a track,” he said, “but for students to go on a piece of cardio equipment, to design their own workouts and be able to run up a hill or through a city so they can visually see where they’re going—it’s just really exciting for us in physical education.”

According to Bird, other than a short transition period for students and teachers to learn to use the new equipment and navigate the building, the lack of parking space was the only foreseen problem with the new fitness center. Bird said administrators were already discussing options to remedy the issue but did not have a specific alternative in mind.

As for Wright, he said benefits of the center outweigh any potential problems.

“This is a really exciting opportunity for any student at CHS who’s involved in a physical education class, which everyone’s required to take—the center is one of those areas where everyone will have an opportunity to utilize it in some shape or form,” he said. “It’ll be an area that I think will be used more than any other area in the school. I think there’s a misconception that it’s an athletic complex when the reality is that it’s a physical education complex.

“When you talk about the different classes, from sports medicine to health to basic physical education to APC, every single class is going to be affected in a positive way. That’s something that we’ve needed, and it’s been an eight-year process, although it’s been very exciting. (The new center) really finishes off the campus,” Wright said. “I don’t know why parents would want their kids to go anywhere else.”