UW’s Half Acre Recreation and Wellness Center was honored with a national award that recognizes its excellence as a facility and its value to UW students.
The new award, recognizing the facility in total, comes from NIRSA: Leaders in Collegiate Recreation, a national organization of “dedicated professionals, students and businesses,” as described on its website. The acronym itself was once short for ‘National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association’ before the organization retired it but kept the letters.
“NIRSA is the leader of collegiate recreation, at their national convention in Denver, we were honored as one of nine schools that won an Outstanding Sports Facility Award,” Director of Half Acre Pat Moran said. “They look at things like architectural design, functionality, how well it serves the needs of your students. There are excellent community and collegiate recreation centers in this region, in this state and around the nation, we are so thrilled to say that Half Acre Recreation and Wellness Center is one of these facilities.”
The award is an important statement of Half Acre’s value to UW and its students as a prominent institution on campus.
“Recreation facilities on college campuses are very important for the recruitment and retention of students, some students are very interested in quality facilities and programs,” Moran said. “That’s what NIRSA helps with and helps identify—quality, state-of-the-art facilities and that’s what this award is about.”
The center recently completed an extensive renovation, fully completed in March 2016, that brought the facility into the modern age and earned its place among the nine facilities across the country that were recognized by NIRSA.
“With this renovation, what we did was we took a building that was originally built in the 1920s and we renovated it into a state-of-the-art recreation and wellness center,” Moran said. “There’s great history in this building, the building’s been serving the university community so well for 90 years. For us to be able to expand this historic building was a great project, it was so much fun.”
Brooke Baker, facility operations graduate assistant, said Half Acre was a vital step forward for UW’s appeal and reputation.
“It was completely necessary for Wyoming and what students wanted, we get a lot of good feedback for it,” Baker said. “When I give tours a lot of times it’s parents with their kids and their parents went here, they’re from Wyoming and they’re like ‘this is crazy! I don’t even recognize it!’”
In addition to the facility’s tangible presence, Baker sees the preservation of the building’s history on its west side as an expression of the university’s values and identity.
“That’s one thing that I think is great about UW, the university has strong roots and they’re proud of where we came from, we kind of put that on display on our historic side and we love that—but obviously we updated with more technology, more equipment, more space,” Baker said.
Jenna Brown, biology major and student staff worker in Half Acre’s Business Office, emphasized the facility’s welcoming atmosphere and great variety for students.
“One thing that I think we take pride in at Half Acre is that there’s something for everyone here, it’s a really cool opportunity, especially for incoming freshmen if they don’t really know what they’re into or don’t really know themselves,” Brown said. “There’s so many new things for them to try, like rock climbing or getting involved with the Wellness Center and doing cooking classes or meditation classes or getting involved with outdoor programs. There’s so many opportunities for getting students involved with the university and letting them find out things they enjoy.”
