New Gym and Prices

gymrabbit

OK,

Construction of the new gym should be finished in January. However, kitting out the inside and organising the new staff will take a few months so an opening time of early April 2007 is expected.

The new gym will have a 25 pool, loads of weights, basketball courts, loads of stuff. The gym is costing a lot of money, to build, maintain, run and administer. I'm not sure where the money came from to build it or whatever.

To make the gym economically viable, the Dept of sport are probably going to allow "outsiders" access to the gym facilities (limited? unlimited? i don't know) from probably after 6pm on Friday to Sunday night. Or perhaps all evening times during the week or just weekends. The general idea is 75% of the running costs will come from people with 25% access. Or something like that.

The other thing that looks likely is that all students who want to use the gym for any reason will have to be members. This will involve paying between 150 and 180 for membership (this may be just for 3 terms). So depending on the finer details, this ounds like a reasonable deal - state of the art facilites on your doorstep for a couple of euro a week.

My main problem is, people that use the college facilites for sports, either as part of offical clubs affiliated to DUCAC or not, will also be expected to pay this. So if you only use the gym for boxing training you'll have to be a member. So instead of paying 0 euro a year for boxing training you'll have to pay 180.

Ok, we can all accept that most people that player sports on a regular basis in college would use the gym at least occasionally and might in interested in unlimited access (within reason) to the pool and weights gym facilites. And they would have no problem paying the membership as they'd be joining anyway.

However, from a club officer point of view, there are obviously going ot be a lot less people who are going to bother taking up a sport like boxing, judo, tramponlining. So one would expect, general club activity to slightly decrease (perhaps massively in the case of boxing).

The dept of sport has not given any indication if any of this money will make its way back to ducac and then back to the clubs themselves.

So all things considered to you think the current situation is fair? All gym useres have to be gym members even if they don't go near the weights/pool?

Just to clarify, I'm just a random student in college, I'm not on any DUCAC bodies, I don't pretend to repesent anyone. So my information above is probaby a bit lobsided and schrewed because i've heard it via random conversations. However, I am biased in my completely unofficial opinions because I am a member of a number of different sports clubs and I want whats best for them.

xebec

Dunno - perhaps,depends,not sure

I don't think individuals should be made pay for activities that are organised by sports club in college and use the recreation hall - for example boxing - however I do believe that such activities should provide some income for the gym. This could be in the form of an annual subscription from each club for use of the facilities (do they pay this already?) or taking a nominal fee from each person attending training (eg €1) this would be significantly cheaper than everyone in those clubs paying membership but would still provide some source of income to cover general running costs.

As for allowing the general public in during off-peak hours I am all for it, however not sure how it would work as the gym can be relatively quiet during the day but is often busy till 7 or 8 in the evening.

This is my final year here so while I'm celebrating the fact that we are getting these great facilities I'm also disappointed it's taken so long. Not sure where I'll be living next year, but if I'm still in Dublin I fully intend to take out a membership of the new gym. If I'm in London guess I'll be paying more than €500 for similar facilities.

Dunno - perhaps,depends,not sure

If the effective cost of trying out 2 to 3 sports clubs rises from €15 to €155, there'll obviously be a fall off in the numbers of students in clubs. You have to wonder what is the point in building new sporting facilities if it reduces the number of people involved in sport in the college?

I suppose a slightly analogous question is should societies have to pay rent for the rooms they occupy?

gymrabbit

xebec wrote:

Ihowever I do believe that such activities should provide some income for the gym. This could be in the form of an annual subscription from each club for use of the facilities (do they pay this already?) or taking a nominal fee from each person attending training (eg €1) this would be significantly cheaper than everyone in those clubs paying membership but would still provide some source of income to cover general running costs.

Sports clubs receive money from ducac which receives money from the pav profits and from college. The gym is run by the department of sport which is a seperate entity completely to DUCAC. If a club has 100 active members that would be 1500 or 1800 memberships to the gym. If clubs were forced to pay this, they would either receive it from DUCAC (DUCAC have 50 sports clubs) or do their own fundraising.

In most instances, charging a euro or 2 euro amounts to pittance over the year and not worth the effort in my opinion.

I don't think Department of sport are appraoching this as a good method to increase income - charge sportsclub participants for entry. It just happens to be an unpleasant side effect of all gym users must be gym members.

Other issues worth noting are that not all sports clubs use the gym all tha regularly. The boat club for example would carry out the majority of its practices at islandbridge, the tennis club on the tennis courts, rugby on the rugby pitches. Do you not think it would be unfair to expect them to pay for use of the college tennis courts for the university's tennis club to practice on?

Also, if I was a basketballer, a badminton player, or similar and I was expected to pay this sum for training in the gym I'd expect to have adequate training times. Currently, these clubs have to rent courts in other gyms, usually schools around dublin.

The most obvious compromise is students can use the gym facilites - changing rooms, basketball courts, matted areas, for club training but have to pay to use the weights section and pool.

This is the system used in DCU, UCD, UL and I think most other colleges/unis in Ireland. UL have a similar gym to our new one.

xebec

Dunno - perhaps,depends,not sure

gymrabbit wrote:

Sports clubs receive money from ducac which receives money from the pav profits and from college. The gym is run by the department of sport which is a seperate entity completely to DUCAC. If a club has 100 active members that would be 1500 or 1800 memberships to the gym. If clubs were forced to pay this, they would either receive it from DUCAC (DUCAC have 50 sports clubs) or do their own fundraising.

I'm aware of this, they also receive funding from their memberships (this is actually related to the amount they get from DUCAC, more members, more funding). Firstly I'm not suggesting that clubs pay their members subscriptions to the gym but a nominal fee, and secondly, clubs who don't use the gym to train shouldn't have to pay.

gymrabbit wrote:

In most instances, charging a euro or 2 euro amounts to pittance over the year and not worth the effort in my opinion.

Really? Wanna give me that pittance for every member of a club that uses a gym during the year then? Lets do some maths... Suppose, club gets on average 30 members at a training session, charges €2 a session and trains on average twice a week - for a 30 week academic year thats €1800, not really a pittance to any club or the gym... Hmm, now so I guess it's not unrealistic that 10 clubs could use the facilities like this during the week, now we're looking at ~€18,000 per 30 week period. I'm not interested in how accurate these figures are, they're just for illustration that €2 per member per session wouldn't be seen as pittance in most circumstances.

The other thing that hasn't been considered is the corporate use of the facilities. There was a plan to really push getting corporate members of the new facilities - how do I know this? 4 members of my class did the study on the potential levels of usage of corporate members last year on behalf of the Dept of Sport - don't know what the story is with this but they haven't really made anything known. Are they going to make discounted memberships available to companies in the area or just going to give them off-peak memberships like everyone else?

gymrabbit

xebec wrote:

Really? Wanna give me that pittance for every member of a club that uses a gym during the year then? Lets do some maths... Suppose, club gets on average 30 members at a training session, charges €2 a session and trains on average twice a week - for a 30 week academic year thats €1800, not really a pittance to any club or the gym... Hmm, now so I guess it's not unrealistic that 10 clubs could use the facilities like this during the week, now we're looking at ~€18,000 per 30 week period. I'm not interested in how accurate these figures are, they're just for illustration that €2 per member per session wouldn't be seen as pittance in most circumstances.

Ah I love msiss people, so full of ****. I agree 1800 a year isn't pittance. How about if we took the figure of 15 people per session This is a little bit more accurate for the majority of clubs. Ok, we'll charge the 2euro fee. 2 days a week is fine. We have 3 terms, 8 weeks, 8 weeks and 6 weeks. We can assume that in Trinity term we'll have little or no attendance. So it's 16 * 2 * 2 * 15 = 960 euro. Not a sum to be scoffed at but again in my opinon not worth the effort.

shay_562

Dunno - perhaps,depends,not sure

It's clearly ridiculous, and while it may be financially helpful for the Sports Dept., it'll **** over clubs when they're trying to bring in new members; it's easy to sell to people as "€4 gives you the chance to try and the sport out", selling "It's €4, then €150 on top of that whether you ever use the gym again or not" is impossible to sell and will drive away new members completely.

Tacitha

Dunno - perhaps,depends,not sure

Given that college must have got at least 2.5 million euros directly from students to construct that gym (£50 annual levy on top of the normal reg/student services fee * at least 10,000 students per annum * four years from 1997-2000 inclusive), I would expect to see a much stronger commitment to student activity from its custodians.
What exactly is the Department of Sport? And given that it was the 1997 SU that proposed the student levy, what is the current SU involvement in this issue?

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI

Dunno - perhaps,depends,not sure

All the ***** who voted yes or dunno should be hanged imho.

There's no way in **** clubs are going to attract anyone but people who were hardcore sports heads anyway. It's moronic.

ApeXaviour

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI wrote:

All the ***** who voted yes or dunno should be hanged imho.

Lovely.

Do we know for a fact that this is how it's going to be run? I can't really see it being the case.

Crash

ZWEI i unbanned you and the first thing you do is start talking aggressive ****e. once more and you're permanently banned.