KU Recreation center completed in Fall of 2003 through Kevin Yoder's leadership.

Article from winter 2003 Kansas Alumni Magazine

By Chris Lazzarino

New recreation center is the latest Mount Oread landmark.

The Student Recreation Fitness Center opened Sept. 26 and already one of its memorable features must be defined as tragedy: From here on out, students running laps in luxury will never know what it was like to work out in Robinson Center.

Runners, lifters and basketball players would not be able to imagine the clammy claustrophobia and long waits for equipment and open courts. They’ll not understand the cramped, crazy access schedule that always favored classes and research over personal fitness.

Sweatin’ to the oldies at Robinson was enough to drive anyone up a wall. The same can be said about the new joint across the parking lot, but now the wall is 42 fiberglass feet of vertical, with safety harnesses and handholds.

Yes, the Student Recreation Fitness Center, clumsily named and elegantly appointed, must be seen to be believed, but Robinson Center must have been endured for this 100,000-square-foot sweat shrine to be appreciated.

There’s a lounge with a wall-mounted flat-screen TV; a healthy-foods snack counter; 15,000 square feet of treadmills, elliptical trainers, stationary bikes, resistance machines and free weights; 25,000 square feet of top-of-the-line wood flooring for four full-size basketball courts (including permanent volleyball nets that retract into the ceiling); two racquetball courts, a martial arts room and an aerobics studio; a seventh-of-a-mile jogging track; two full-size outdoor basketball courts (the only outdoor hoops courts on campus); and windows, glorious windows, from sunrise to sunset.

As he tinkered with a weight machine days before the center’s harried Sept. 25 dedication, Jeff Paxton, d’91, regional sales representative for Life Fitness, said, “I think it’s safe to say KU went from grossly behind the times to having one of the premier facilities in the nation.”

Recreation Services Director Mary Chappell is fond of saying, “This is a building for students, about students and by students,” and there’s the heart of the matter. Fitness? Sure. Recreation? You bet. Yet this $17 million building is about those things only as a byproduct: It is here for students and it is about students because it is by students.

Though officially approved by Chancellor Robert E. Hemenway and the Kansas Board of Regents, the proposed building gulped its first breath of life with a student referendum in April 1999. Not only did students agree that they needed a new, freestanding recreation center, but they also agreed to pay for it—even those who would never get the chance to use it.

It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. “The Kansas Union, Watkins Health Center, Burge Union, the Hilltop Child Development Center and now the new recreation center, all have been paid for by student fees with no state money being provided,” says David Ambler, the now-retired vice chancellor for student affairs. “It’s a rich history of generation after generation of KU students who are willing to dig deep into their own pockets to make sure this campus has the kind of facilities and programs that make KU the wonderful environment that it is for our students.”

Robinson Center has always led a double life. During the day, and often long into the evenings, it is home to busy class and research schedules, accommodating diverse programs such as physical education courses, weight-loss clinics, high-tech exercise science research, dance and first-aid classes.

Students, faculty and staff hoping to lift weights, swim or play basketball had to wait their turn, showing up early in the morning, over the lunch hour or in the evenings—along with everyone else. In Robinson gymnasium, working out usually meant a lot of standing around.

Like homeowners who concentrate on the lawn to avoid acknowledging a leaky roof, KU refused to admit the truth and continually made due with a series of renovations and additions. In the 1970s, for instance, the infamous old basketball courts, which defined the notion of rugged sweat boxes, finally were replaced with a modern (read: ventilated) gymnasium—never mind that the courts were built to junior-high dimensions, perfect for the flabby but not so invigorating for kids with game.

Finally, in 1996, students brought forth a referendum for a new facility, but circumstances and details were not right. A location was never established (some thought it would naturally land on West Campus, but approval had never been sought from the KU Endowment Association, which owns the land), and construction costs, pegged at $23 million, would have created a monumental fee of $90 a semester. “I wouldn’t mind paying a small increase in fees for an addition to Robinson,” one student opponent told the University Daily Kansan, “but this is too much.”

In late February 1996, the proposal was handily defeated, 2,307 to 983. Within a week, student and staff organizers publicly acknowledged their mistakes and pledged to rethink the matter while not giving up. As local gyms aggressively courted and catered to students, and the die-hards made due with Robinson’s cramped and unpleasant quarters, the matter of a student-funded, stand-alone recreation center faded into obscurity. And then, in spring 1998, fifth-year senior Kevin Yoder was elected student body president.

“During that first summer, when we were trying to plan out an agenda of things to do, we started getting complaints from students about Robinson,” Yoder recalls. “I wasn’t entirely familiar with how it worked and what the problems were, but in an effort to be responsive to student needs, I visited with the administration, did some research, and began to realize that a real problem existed, and there was nothing I could do about it.”

Not among the thousands who lined up for basketball games or scrambled to land their fannies on weight benches and stationary bikes, Yoder was stunned to learn that students could only work out in Robinson from 6 to 8 a.m., or 5 to 9 p.m. “And then we started having classes meet there in the evenings; the band was using one of the gyms … it just became obvious that we did not have a rec center here. The priorities for Robinson were classes, athletics, drill team, band, anything else they could think of, and the last consideration was student recreation.” Ambler, then the official administration liaison and unofficial confidant for student leaders, recalls Yoder’s immediate enthusiasm for the rec center. He says Yoder pledged it would become a reality, and it finally dawned on Ambler that he didn’t mean theoretically.

“I think he literally believed we could get a referendum passed, planning done and the building under construction before the end of his term,” Ambler says.“I dubbed him the ‘Hutchinson Road Runner.’ He was a very ambitious, high-energy person who, when he believed in something or decided he wanted to move it, it had better get out of the way because it’s going to be moved.” Pure enthusiasm was not enough, of course, and Yoder and the student leaders he appointed to his new Campus Recreation Task Force were venturing into dangerous territory. The first rec center proposal had been crushed just two years earlier, very little had yet emerged to indicate a serious change in student attitudes, and nobody had yet proposed any significant changes that would make the plans palatable to students. A second losing referendum so soon after the first might forever doom dreams of a freestanding recreation center paid for by students and not beholden to academic schedules.

Says Ambler: “All of us were a little concerned that if a second proposal went down to defeat, it would be a really long time before we could get it back on the ballot, so to speak, for the third time.”

Yoder, c’99, l’02, now a state representative from Overland Park and an attorney with a firm in Olathe, threw himself into the issue. He spent 10, 12, even 14 hours a day on it, missing classes and pushing himself and the committee members to exhaustion. “We truly believed that there was student support for it,” he says, “but we had to do more than win. A big victory was absolutely essential: one, to silence the critics in the administration, and two, to silence the students who were against us.”

Yoder recalls that student political groups opposed to the rec center distributed flyers and posters declaring that they would save every student $100 by killing the proposal. He acknowledges as “somewhat more valid” another line of attack, which considered an expensive gymnasium as distant from core matters—libraries, faculty salaries, classrooms—and not worth serious discussion, let alone millions of dollars.
“We felt that we needed this type of facility to provide a center for student life that really accentuates all the academic pursuits,” Yoder says. “If we always spent the first and last dollar on academics, that means we don’t believe in having a student affairs program at KU.”
As he examined the defeated proposal from 1996, Yoder zeroed in on what he saw as the fatal flaw: Students did not think it was their job to fund a rec center. They saw it as the University’s responsibility, Yoder says, because they interpreted the referendum as the administration’s doing. (Perhaps that was because an executive vice chancellor appointed the first planning committee, in spring 1995, though that happened only after Student Senate requested a feasibility study.)
“Find a donor, go to Topeka, just stop coming to us to pay for something we don’t want,” Yoder says, paraphrasing student feelings about the 1996 proposal. “We had to answer those questions right off the bat.”

Yoder confirmed with the Endowment Association that no donor was available, and he found that most of KU’s peer universities launched their new recreation centers with student fees. Robinson Center was the Big 12’s smallest, oldest and least-accessible student recreation center, and Yoder and the student committee relied on those unfortunate rankings to change attitudes.

They visited every student organization and living group on campus; each presentation concluded with a survey of student opinions. They reached out for help from University staff experienced in writing proposals, kept the issue in the University Daily Kansan and received Hemenway’s pledge that if students agreed to the center in a referendum, the chancellor would “definitely look at it.”

The recreation center planning committee eased projected costs from $23 million to $17 million, and the total fee increase dropped from $77 per semester to $49. The catalog of amenities began to include specifics, including the climbing wall, and planners found a site for the center: the intramural field at the southern edge of campus. As ambiguity yielded to detail, students came around.

One obstacle remained: Why should I pay for it if I’m never going to use it? “Students who were graduating in spring 1999 could vote for it and leave, and never pay a thing,” Yoder says.“Sophomores would pay for two or three years and never get a chance to use it. To vote for it would be a generous gift to the University. What we told the students was, if every student body had that attitude, we would never accomplish anything. We need to leave the torch burning brighter. It sounds cliché, but that’s essentially the message we left with students.”

The referendum, coupled with regular student elections, attracted a large turnout and passed with 70 percent of 4,055 votes. As a stand-alone item, the spring 1996 referendum attracted 3,290 voters, and 70 percent rejected it.

Hemenway and Provost David Shulenburger, convinced by the referendum as well as Yoder’s continuing lobbying, came to agree that the project was worth presenting to the Board of Regents and the Legislature. By spring 2000 planning was underway; at 8:15 a.m. on April 2, 2001, a backhoe ripped out the first scoop of dirt, and a good old field slowly gave way to recreation of the future.

The students aren’t done yet. They recently agreed to tax themselves $3.50 a semester to build a Multicultural Resource Center at the Kansas Union, and have, since 1989, taxed themselves $2 for campus lighting and safety.

Of the 16 mandatory fees students now pay, the only one they did not agree to by referendum or through their Student Senate was for women’s and nonrevenue sports. In 1977 students voted to stop taxing themselves to support men’s varsity athletics, to be soon followed by withdrawal of their support for women’s sports. University administrators begged Student Senate to reconsider, because it was obligated to fund women’s athletics under Title IX; an end to student support of women’s sports would mean the end to all intercollegiate athletics at KU.

University administrators asked the Board of Regents to approve the fee, over students’ objections. That had not happened before, and has not happened since.

“It’s my view that when the state establishes a residential university, it has an obligation to provide not only the classrooms but spaces outside the classrooms that are safe and create a wholesome environment for students,” Ambler says. “But we barely have enough money for academic programs, so if we are going to have some of these things, it’s going to take a commitment from students. And students at KU have always stepped up.”

Two visions for the Student Recreation Fitness Center remain unfulfilled: Kevin Yoder dreams of the day when he can show his children what their father helped create for his alma mater, and Mary Chappell can’t wait for it to snow. Gazing through acres of windows with a view up the Hill, she says, simply, “We’re sure it’s going to be wonderful.”

Imagine missing out on that placid scene, stuck inside steamy Robinson for another grim winter. Would have been tragedy indeed.

— Chris Lazzarino