Spring sports crowd Carr center

According to Saint Anselm's website, "the widely used Carr Center allows for a number of different activities at once, whether they are organized club sports, volunteer programs, or a simple pickup basketball game." Spring sports teams' practices are not on the list. Around this time of year when everyone has come back from winter break, students looking for space to be active without getting frostbite are often met with a fitness center full of baseball players, or courts occupied by intramural teams, the tennis team, or an assortment of club sports teams.

Eric Sabean, the Assistant Director for Facilities, has been dealing with this issue since he came to Saint Anselm eleven years ago. "I'm probably the least liked person on campus this time of year by everybody because the varsity teams are upset, the out of season teams are upset, the club sport teams are upset, and the general students are upset because nobody can get what they want."

Since the weather doesn't permit most of the spring sports teams to practice outside, they use the Carr Center instead. Sabean said, "The Carr Center is unique in that, yes it's a recre ational facility, but it's the only indoor space that other teams and groups can use. So right now we have about fifteen teams, and club sports that use the Carr Center for various practices. That's a lot of teams, and club sports, and groups that want to use it. So if you're not a part of that, there's not a lot of time set aside for, you know, you and your friends to come down and shoot some hoops. It's an unfortunate situation, and it happens every single year when we come back from Christmas break. From Christmas break through Spring break this place is busy from six a.m. until midnight, just about every single day of the week. Is it the ideal situation? No. The spring teams would like to practice more often but we limit the number of practices to four times a week. They'd like to go six times a week, but we can't have it. Club sports would like to go two or three times a week but right now they're only going once or twice."

With so many demands to meet, it is hard for those piecing together the Carr Center's schedule to accommodate everyone, but they try. Spring sports teams used to be allowed to have five practices a week, but three years ago, the fifth practice was taken away. Of the one hundred and ten hours a week that the Carr Center is open, spring sports teams collectively are only allowed to have about forty-eight hours of practice time, and practices can't be scheduled during peak hours.

"'Peak hours' is something that we deem between six and ten p.m. It's when the fitness center is most packed. when students have gotten out of classes for the day." Sabean also makes the point that spring sports teams are not a higher priority than the general student body, which is usually the group of people most frustrated with the Carr Center schedule this time of year.

"When we have [our] meeting in the fall, we block off that time, and the athletic teams are practicing as early as six o'clock in the morning and as late as midnight on a lot of nights. The baseball team is practicing from one to three, just because that's not a very common time for a lot of students to come down and use the courts to play basketball."

The athletic department does the best they can to accommodate everybody and updates the schedule almost daily. "The [Carr Center] schedule is always posted in the lobby and there's always about ten or twelve extras that people can take... If they know what the schedule is, they can plan a little bit better and come down between the hours of six and ten, and have a court that's going to be free."

Time will help smooth things over as well. "Once we get back from Spring break, all these teams will be outside. and things will open up in the Carr Center." The new fitness center will be finished soon, offering three times as much space as the current fitness center, which is going to be renovated to a varsity weight room. Varsity teams therefore won't be taking up equipment in the new space.

Sabean also said, "The College is looking into having some software so you could be sitting in your room, look up the Carr Center and say, 'Okay is there a court free at seven o'clock tonight? Yes there is, let's grab our sneakers and head down.' It should be coming." "It's great that our campus is so active. We've got so many people that want to be active and right now we have a limited amount of space that we can use, so we try to manage it as best as we can.