Students and faculty have gym pass, but many don't use it

Upon walking into the gym at Mercer County Community College, one is greeted with a surprising yet familiar scene. Upon entering the facility, one is greeted with the regular gym scene: a rubber matted room packed with free weights, an assortment of equipment with which to use them, over 20 aerobic machines and over twenty weight training machines.

However, rather than witnessing a plethora of sweating students in movement, it is more common to see the concrete walls encasing a range of people. The mercer gym is open to anyone in the Mercer area, and thus an extreme array of students, family men, mothers, even grandmothers can and do flock to Mercer for their basic work-out needs.

The Mercer County Community College gym provides all the necessities for a basic workout- it is small and simple, yet it is clean and efficient. However, only a percentage of students who exercise regularly use the Mercer gym. A recent survey of 30 random Mercer County Community College students concluded that very few students use the facilities. While the membership is free for full-time students and only $35 a semester for students with less than 25 credits, many students take their business off-campus.
In addition to the basic equipment, the gym offers pool memberships as well as free yoga classes. However, Austin Atkins, a gym employee and a Burlington Community College student, said that in a three hour shift, he sees only about 30 people shuffle through the door.

Through the survey 10 students admitted to rarely exercising at all. This in itself is a factor in the amount of students who use the gym- those who don't make working-out a habit won't be venturing into the gym too often.

Also, out of the 20 students that reported they do exercise regularly, five said they do so either at home or at another private venue, while the other 15 said they have memberships elsewhere.

It is easy to wonder why with such an affordable and convenient gym on campus, so many students would be willing to pay extravagant bills for gym memberships. Perhaps it's because although the Mercer gym is convenient and well-stocked it does lack some of the services of other, more expensive gyms.

Lindsay Townsend, a second-semester art major put it simply, "when I go to the gym, I usually like to take classes, and my gym has a lot of different classes that are included in the membership fee."

While the Mercer gym gets the job done, it doesn't offer several classes, nor does it have a café, a spa, a luxurious locker room, or a sauna, all traits that other gyms often boast. Still, how many people actually use the salons, spas, and cafes that their gyms have to offer?

Matthew Marini, a second year student at Mercer puts it into perspective; "the luxuries private gyms offer are nice, but I can just as easily get a coffee at Dunkin' Donuts down the street with my $35 membership, rather than pay much more a month and have the convenience of getting coffee immediately after I work out."

If this is the attitude some students adopt, it is still easy to wonder why more students don't take advantage of the cheap membership Mercer has to offer. Perhaps it is because many students aren't aware that the gym is accessible to them for such a low fee. Out of the 15 afore-mentioned surveyed students, only five said they knew about the cheap fee for the Mercer gym and still chose to go elsewhere.

Perhaps Mercer isn't doing enough to encourage students to use their facilities. Mike DeAngelis, the fitness coordinator said that its "silly to go elsewhere" considering the cheap price of membership, yet he also says that "membership could be higher."

Ultimately, he has plans to advertise the availability of the gym in the future, and hopes to encourage more members of the outside community to join,

However, it's lucky for those who do choose to use the gym that not everyone who can takes advantage of it. If every student at Mercer, an estimated 8,928 used the gym, it would lose its appeal as an uncrowded, relaxed environment. This is without factoring in any number of the 365,449 county residents that also have access to the gym.

It goes without saying that much of the appeal of the gym would vanish if everyone who could use it, did. So while it may seem as if the gym is never the hottest spot on campus, according to , Blake Marshall, a Mercer alum works out at the gym about three times a week, the gym is "not too busy, you never have to wait for a machine," and that may be the most convenient aspect of the gym out of all of them.