Enhancing the journey

By Deborah Lilly

While the Kardatzke Wellness Center was still under construction, Barrett Bates, Anderson University’s director of intercollegiate athletics, predicted the facility would become the new gathering place on campus. He was right. Intramural sports, team practices, fitness classes and individual fitness fanatics fill the fieldhouse, fitness center and weight room every day. Students also use the facility for classes and lab work. The $17.4 million facility was the largest construction project in the university’s 85-year history, and students, faculty and staff have found it well worth the wait.

Physical fitness has always been a part of AU’s mission. During the early days of the university, instructors believed students would be better scholars and more effective ministers if they sought spiritual, mental and physical well-being. Classrooms, dormitories and the community provided support for spiritual and intellectual growth. To maintain physical fitness, students dedicated 45 minutes every day to calisthenics or group games. They organized recreational activities on the lawn around Old Main and used the dining hall at the Gospel Trumpet Company (now Warner Press) as a gymnasium. In 1936, students worked with a professional architect to convert an old Church of God campmeeting auditorium into the university’s first gymnasium (now Byrum Hall). In 1937, physical education gained academic departmental status.

Gertrude Wunsch (pictured bottom, right) joined the physical education faculty in 1955. Bob Macholtz, Jim Macholtz and Ernie Rangazas were her only colleagues in the department. “We were just like a family,” Wunsch says. “We all worked together as if no one person was more important than another.”

All of their classes and indoor sport practices and games were held in Byrum Hall, or “the roundhouse,” as Wunsch calls it. It wasn’t unusual for a team to be practicing on the floor at the same time students rehearsed for a play on the stage. It was a busy place. And when AU hosted indoor sports competitions, spectators for the visiting team would arrive 45 minutes before the game just to get a seat.

“It was a very close, intimate place to play,” remembers Barrett Bates BA ’63. “Spectators were right on the floor. You could pack 800 to 1,000 people in there. It was like a sardine can.”

The department’s budget was just as tight. Jim Macholtz had developed some skills as a plumber and put them to use whenever necessary in “the roundhouse.” He also made some of the athletic equipment. Funds were so scarce, Wunsch remembers, that when they lost balls during baseball games, they’d have to stop the game to hunt for them so play could continue.

In 1962 the department received a real boost — in facilities and morale — with the completion of O.C. Lewis Gymnasium. “It was one of the best small college facilities in the state of Indiana at that time,” says Bates. “And it’s still an excellent small college facility.”

In the past 40 years, the department has grown in students, faculty and staff, and programs, and the athletic program has added seven new competitive sports teams since 1975. More than 400 students are involved in competitive sports and academic programs in the Department of Kinesiology this year. The physical education and health programs continue to evolve to keep up with the times and changes in the Indiana state licensure program.

“Physical education and health are taking on a new face,” says Dr. Becky Hull, chair of the Anderson University Department of Kinesiology. In class, physical education majors are learning not only how to teach team sports but how to provide opportunities for all children to be active at all times, an idea that has greatly impacted the program’s pedagogy classes. In addition, Hull explains, “We have a greater emphasis on the sciences, hence the name ‘kinesiology’ instead of ‘physical education.’ Health, physical education and the world of fitness have become real technology-based disciplines as well.”

Space — and equipment — became an issue once again for the department. Students needed more space for classrooms, more space for practice, more space for all-campus recreational activities and more space for equipment storage. The addition of the 132,000-square-foot Kardatzke Wellness Center solves these problems and creates more opportunities for the entire AU community.

The Tom and Sch’ree Ward Fieldhouse occupies most of the floor space in the new facility. The multipurpose fieldhouse features four regulation basketball courts, a 200-meter regulation indoor running track, two drop-down batting cages and, on the upper level, a 305-meter indoor walking/jogging track.

With the addition of the fieldhouse, the Campus Activities Board expanded the intramural program from five to 20 sports. Last year 500 students participated in intramural sports, but that figure is expected to double this year.

Area children benefit as well from the Ward Fieldhouse. Once a week, AU students majoring in physical education teach 120 homeschooled children representing 50 families. Last year their classes were held on every available floor space in the O.C. Lewis and East gyms, and there still wasn’t enough room. But now Hull says, “There are at least eight teaching stations in the fieldhouse.” And the youngsters are delighted with all that new space.

In addition to all of the scheduled activities in the Ward Fieldhouse, the university is committed to always keeping one track and one court open to students, faculty and staff who want to stop by for a quick game of basketball with friends or a brisk walk around the track.

The Raven track and field team is excited about the new 200-meter indoor competition track. It has a Mondo surface with six lanes around the oval and eight lanes for hurdles in the straightaway. There is a long-jump pit and areas for pole-vault, high jump and shot put competitions. “The way the facility is configured, all of those events could go on at the same time the running events are taking place without impeding each other,” says Larry Maddox BA ’66, head cross country and track and field coach at AU.

While AU is now the only school in the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Con-ference to have an indoor competition track, Maddox’s students have routinely participated in indoor meets during winter months. In order to practice, Maddox explains, “There have been times when we’ve shoveled 400 meters of snow off of the outdoor track in order to run on it.” The job required careful shoveling so as to not damage the surface of the track. He admits, “I will not miss that at all.”

The university will host its first indoor meet the evening of Feb. 8.

Ready for a change

Professors in the sports medicine/athletic training program shed few tears when their office of 20 years tumbled to the ground at the hands of a professional wrecking crew. They were more than ready to move into their new home in the Kardatzke Wellness Center. For the first time in decades, they had SPACE — space for equipment, space for offices, space for students to work.

When the sports medicine and athletic training program began in the 1970s, it was confined to a 300-square-foot room in O.C. Lewis Gymnasium. The program soon outgrew the space, and in 1982 moved into a double-wide trailer. Soon that space was too small, as the program grew from a 16-hour minor to a 54-hour major, from one to four faculty members, and consistently stretched its capacity of students in the program.

“We didn’t have any space at all,” says Elissa Dorr, a senior sports medicine major from Springfield, Ill. “We’d have student athletes lined up out the door waiting for treatments.”

“We didn’t have a very good facility,” Steve Risinger BA ’74, director of the sports medicine/athletic training program, agrees, “but we had an excellent reputation. We’ve produced some really outstanding athletic trainers — people who are making a difference in schools, hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices all over the United States.” In fact, the AU program was one of the first in Indiana to be accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs.

It was that reputation plus a Christian atmosphere that brought Dorr to AU. “There aren’t a lot of colleges with both strong Christian [values] and a strong athletic training program,” she says.

Dorr is enjoying her senior year in the new 5,800-square-foot Bill and Gloria Gaither Sports Medicine Center. Not only do students have more space but also more equipment, including a water rehabilitation pool and whirlpools. And everything is under one roof. No more running to one building to gather equipment, another for class and yet another to work with injured athletes.

At the small-college level, Risinger says, “There aren’t very many sports medicine programs with a facility as nice as ours is now.”

Room for a new major

For the past 21 years, Dr. Douglas Seelbach, professor in the Department of Kinesiology, has taught exercise science and developed exercise science labs. When he came to AU three years ago, his classroom housed only a treadmill and an exercise bike. “We could only do very basic testing,” he says. Now he has a 1,950-square-foot laboratory.

The Lester and Marguerite Hardacre Human Performance lab is a “very well equipped, comprehensive lab,” Seelbach says. “We’ll use it for a number of different classes, including exercise physiology, exercise testing and prescription, and anatomy and physiology. Eventually we’ll do community fitness testing, such as stress testing or body composition.”

The lab is stocked with an EKG system for stress testing, a metabolic cart to test aerobic fitness, a hydrostatic weighing tank to determine body density and a kinematic analysis system to analyze an athlete’s golf swing or shot put throw.

“In order to have an exercise science major, you really need a place where you can do exercise science. Before, we could talk about it in the classroom. Now we can actually get in a lab and do it,” Seelbach says.

Exercise science is a 44-hour major that includes classes in physical education, biology, chemistry, physics and psychology. The degree will train students to work in fitness centers or for athletic equipment companies or to pursue graduate degrees in physical therapy, nutrition, medicine or education.

Creating opportunities for wellness

But the Kardatzke Wellness Center was built with the intention that the entire campus community — not just kinesiology students and Raven athletes — would benefit from a wellness facility. Before the structure was complete, Barrett Bates said, “I anticipate that 70 to 80 percent of our student body will go through this building every day.”

Since the building opened for use on Oct. 14, Bates and students working at the front desk have been keeping track of the number of students, faculty and staff using the facility on an hourly basis. In its first four weeks, the R. Glenn and Berny Falls Fitness Center and Fieldhouse experienced an average of 3,378 visits every week and the weight room an average of 2,183. Connie Reardon Hippensteel BA ’67, the new director of wellness programs at the center, averaged 16 personal exercise assessments a week by mid November, and the number of requests was rising. Hippensteel’s yoga class for faculty and staff easily maxed out at 20 participants, and 100 students gathered in the fieldhouse every Thursday evening for a cardio kickboxing class.

“I see people working out now who have never worked out before,” says Kelly McMillan, a senior social work and criminal justice double major who works in the weight room two mornings a week.

The Kardatzke Wellness Center is open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday and an additional 20 hours over the weekend. “There is absolutely no reason for a student not to be able to come over and exercise at any time of the day,” says Bates.

Not only is there time, the new Center also has the added space and new top-of-the-line equipment. The weight room, now located in the Falls Fitness Center, has grown from 2,500 to 6,300 square feet and includes stacks and plate-loaded weights. The cardio room has grown from two machines to 24 and includes treadmills, stationery bicycles, stairclimbers, elliptical machines, and a versa/climber. The cardio and weight-training stations each feature four television sets for people who crave entertainment while they exercise.

For students, McMillan says the new center is comparable to any fitness club but without the membership fee that most college students can’t afford.

Wellness is about more than getting in 30 minutes of exercise four or five times a week or just losing an extra 15 pounds. “Wellness is a journey. It’s not an endpoint,” explains Dr. Becky Hull. “Wellness is the process of enhancing personal well-being — spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally and vocationally.”

Hippensteel’s job is to help students, faculty and staff map out a plan for that journey. “I see my job in the beginning as trying to get people moving no matter what,” she says. “I have a passion for helping people realize how much better they can feel — regardless of weight loss or shaping bodies — when they move every day.”

Hippensteel comes to AU after 15 years working in corporate fitness. Her office is located in the J. Willard and Virginia Reardon Wellness Education Center, and she takes her role as a leader in wellness education seriously. “There are a lot of wellness activities already taking place on campus, and I don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” she says. Her impression of students, faculty and staff at AU is that they have already found some balance in the social, intellectual and spiritual aspects of life. She plans to offer more in the areas of physical fitness and emotional health as it relates to stress.

“The amount of money that went into this facility and the commitment of the people who gave to this project are a real affirmation to the idea that it is part of God’s plan for us to take care of our bodies,” says Hippensteel.

Hull adds, “My greatest desire is for people to realize they are made in the image of God.” She and her colleagues have no intention of becoming the campus “wellness police.” “That’s the furthest thing from our minds,” Hull says. “Instead we will be encouragers, facilitators and fellow travelers.”