By Brittany Burke
Following a busy semester, RECentral classes are beginning to dwindle down due to the final push toward a hectic finals week and eventually winter break.
The schedule weekly classes offered by RECentral will be rearranged due to finals week and its own jumbled schedule. According to Ken DeStefanis, the program’s recreation specialist, which classes can be held depends on the availability of student instructors.
In order to keep students of the classes informed emails have been sent out and an updated schedule will be posted on the RECentral website.
The slow finals week comes after a busy semester in which additional classes were scheduled to accommodate the fitness demand.
“We’ve been able to expand our programs a lot,” said Kacey Light, the graduate assistant in charge of scheduling the fitness classes. “We went from having about 30 fitness classes a week to now we have about 40 fitness classes on any given week. We have also been able to acquire a new space on campus down in Davidson Hall, it’s a much bigger, nicer space and allows us to have bigger class numbers and also kind of reach another section on campus, which is helpful for many students.”
The most popular addition to the RECentral fitness regime was a boot camp class taught five times a week on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Boot camp is described as a complete body toning class and only allows for five to ten students, but has become popular amongst participants.
Early morning and late classes have also been added to the cycling schedule, which is comprised of 14 different class times with seven instructors. Not only were classes added, but so was equipment. New bikes were provided by RECentral in order to house more students per class.
Cycling continues to be one of the more popular classes throughout the semester. Due to this popularity and the limited number of bikes, RECentral allows students to sign up online to ensure a bike is held for them.
“We had record numbers that attended all our classes … our boot camp classes were extremely popular, as well as yoga, that’s always had great numbers and spinning’s always had great numbers,” said DeStefanis. “Overall [the semester] was really great. We had a lot of new students also, which was good considering we did not get a chance to address them during freshmen orientation which was cancelled because of weather, so I guess word of mouth is good. People like what they are coming to and are spreading the word.”
According to Light, the monthly average for yoga classes is 270 students, while cycling usually reaches 400 students a month. The monthly average for the new boot camp class over the course of the semester was about 130, but that is due to the restriction in class size.
“We’ve been trying to promote our programs better too, especially with our new space,” said Light. “Really trying to get the word out to more students, using Facebook a lot to promote classes and kind of increasing our following through social media to get more people involved and knowing what’s going on. I think it’s helped really boost attendance.”
While attendance has increased, classes have been cancelled throughout the course of the semester due to poor attendance. The majority of poor involvement is attributed to inconvenient class times, which is something RECentral takes into account for the following semester.
“We’ve been able to try and track our attendance numbers pretty well this semester so we know which classes and what times work better for students, so we’re going to try and keep fine tuning our schedule to have full classes and get rid of the classes that didn’t have as good a attendance because it’s a bad time … so I’m just trying to find more of what the students need and fill those gaps,” said Light.
According to DeStefanis the spring semester should be posted in the upcoming weeks, but it will continue to be reworked depending on the availability of the instructors. RECentral currently employs 18 instructors but is looking to hire more due to the demand of fitness classes.
As the semester comes to a close the staff at RECentral continues to place its focus on making their presence known through fitness inspired campus events. This semester plans were stunted due to the unforeseen weather complications, but ideas for next semester are already being worked on.
“[We have been able] to expand and get more people interested by offering different types of classes and getting student feedback on what they want has helped us to improve and we’re going to continue to do that in the spring,” said Light.
