Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Kenyon's Millenium Athletic Facility

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Once upon a time, a long time ago (1980), I worked in a place that had the biggest, fanciest copier any of us had ever seen. It copied one-sided to two-sided and back again. It collated. It stapled.

Those were the days when Star Wars was relatively new.... One of my co-workers dubbed that copier the Millenium Xerox.

In the same spirit, I offer you -- the Millenium Athletic Facility.

The pool is in the southwest corner (closest to us in this pic).





They have a nifty model of the facility. I tried to graft the two pics together, but my attempt was so awful I left them separate and you'll need to use your imagination to combine them. You can see the pool at bottom right in the first pic, and the indoor track at left in the second. In the middle on the ground floor (left in first pic; right in second) are two basketball courts (the front one for pick-up games, and the back one with bleachers for the teams). In the right rear corner (first pic) there are tennis courts. In the very middle, on the second floor, is an auditorium. In the middle on the right there is an extensive exercise room, with a ton of machines of various kinds.







All the bracing you see in the roof allows for skylights.





Looking over the track from the second floor balcony.





Another night, I walked around the track. Most of the lights were off, which was very peaceful. I could imagine myself walking round and round and round. Maybe with a novel on my ipod?





In this pic and the next you can see the balcony on which I stood to take that brightly-lit pic of the track.





I think these ventilation thingies are cool.





Turning 90 degrees right, we see the glass wall of the building. Behind a net curtain. An ENORMOUS net curtain....

You can see a snowy evergreen outdoors, and the road going steeply up, as well as seeing reflections from inside the building.





Still appreciating the ventilation thingies.





Excellent reflections.....





Heading back toward the pool, I walked along the end of the track, out the door, along the end of the pick-up basketball court, to the entry/lobby, and up the stairs.

Over the open area at the top of the stairs is this excellent art piece.....



In the video above, the lighted area at left is the air over the team's basketball court, and the pool is to our right.....



Here is the last pic I took in the facility -- the upstairs hallway toward the team's basketball court, the women's room, and the track end of the building. There are lots of pics of Kenyon athletes from years gone by along this hallway, along with a few very special trophies.



There are only 1700 students at Kenyon. It is clear that many of them go on to be very successful, and that they remember their student-athlete days at Kenyon fondly.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The man that Coach gave an award to when I was talking to you Saturday evening... I don't know if you were paying attention to what they were saying, but he is the CEO of T. Rowe Price (he's the one I could have had dinner with) and he is a Kenyon alum of '78. They said he was an All-American swimmer, and he is the one who donated the $60 million for the athletic center. So perhaps not necessarily many successful alums, but one or two who are very successful indeed (Coach said he is a multi-billionaire.) Personally I think there are much better things to be done with $60 million, but what do I know.

V

I need orange said...

Right, I did hear who he was. But not that he gave the money.

You are correct, I wasn't thinking of the possibility that one or two people gave the vast majority (or all) of the money. Wonder why I didn't think of one person giving 60 mil? :-)

I agree with you on priorities -- let's hope he gave 500 mil to something more pressing, and we just don't know.

Someone (mama Price?) told me that the Kenyon pool used to be in "that building across the street".....

Gone2theDawgs said...

I'm fascinated with the ventilation thingies! You have taken something that might have been overlooked and made every step you took in the facility a pleasure! Thanks for sharing.

I need orange said...

[blush]

What a nice thing to hear. Thank you. :-) And -- you are most welcome.