It’s been a long five years for Elizabethtown College’s Bowers Center for Recreation, Sports and Well-Being. Almost immediately after the fitness center got the chance to open its doors in August 2019 to the campus community, it had to shutter them for the global pandemic. 

“The fall semester was so amazing in 2019. I can still remember the first person swiping into the building and the excitement of it,” Senior Director for Student Involvement and Well-Being Whitney Crull said. “And then March hit.” 

The Bowers Center had been in the works for a long time. The previous gym space on campus, called “The Body Shop,” inhabited the space where the Jay Lounge now sits. It’s a far cry from the multi-level, multi-use center that towers over Wolf Field. Crull came from the much larger University of Pittsburgh, drawn to Etown by her desire to make an impact. 

“At Pitt, it’s so big that you can’t really see the benefits of your work and it all gets mixed in the chaos,” Crull said. “I wanted to get back to a smaller institution where what I was going to do mattered.”

Crull came into the process after the Bowers Center was designed and when it was in the middle of construction. She toured the facility while it was being built, building excitement for the programs she envisioned. 

When the pandemic hit, it presented challenges that the fitness community didn’t have any prior experience in and certainly was not prepared for. At the Bowers Center, only a certain number of people could use the gym, signing up online for a 50-minute time slot for a workout. 

Even in the fall of 2021, the building wasn’t at full capacity. 

“It was a year and a half of changing the way we did things,” Crull said. “A lot of people had ideas for what to do, and I didn’t even know what the full capacity of the building was.” 

Through the limits and the trials of the first two years, the fitness center endured. Since 2019, it’s gotten more than 330,000 total check-ins, with thousands of students participating in its health and wellness initiatives.

“We are so proud of seeing those numbers even though we had a year and a half where we weren’t even close to full capacity,” Crull said. “We’ve definitely had our fair share of lessons, the biggest is the realization that students change every year.” 

Crull works with Joni Eisenhauer, Assistant Director of Health Promotion, and both have multiple program areas beneath them, including intramurals, the student wellness advocacy group (SWAG), group fitness instructors, personal trainers and fitness center attendants. 

“I’m so proud of our student workers and the reputation we’ve built because we couldn’t do half of the things we do without them,” Crull said. “We could never do intramurals without the coordinators and referees and we couldn’t open on the weekends and at nights without attendants.”

Most of the group fitness instructors are students, and all of the personal trainers, a newer program at Bowers, are students. It’s all students who work at the desks inside the center, and students who work for SWAG that help assist students with health needs. 

Intramural referees, supervisors and coordinators are also students, a program that’s carried out entirely at night when professional staff has left campus. 

Under the Bowers Centers umbrella is the Office of Campus Recreation and Well-Being (RecWell), which supplies many student activities throughout the semester, like Jay Play Day. 

“We built this from the ground up,” Crull said. “There was no campus recreation department before Bowers was built, and it’s a lot of heart and a lot of work.” 

Since the Bowers Center is already a physical building, Crull and Eisenhauer know they can’t add space, but they can expand their programs. They’ve worked with the employee wellness team to come up with an initiative that allows College employees up to 90 minutes a week for health and fitness without clocking out. Bowers has also added personal training, which is utilized mostly by employees of the College. 

Group fitness classes run at all times of the day, allowing students and employees with different class schedules to still participate. Senior Layla Murphy has taken Zumba for the last four years. 

“When I found out my freshman year that Etown had free Zumba classes for students, I immediately joined,” Murphy said. “Group fitness classes like Zumba have allowed me to exercise in a really fun way, while also being in a welcoming environment in the fitness rooms in the Bowers Center.” 

That welcoming environment is something felt by students of all circumstances. The diversity of programs offered by RecWell is a focus, and Crull works hard to incorporate student feedback into the programming. 

“We have to adapt and change each year,” Crull said. “I’m just so proud of what we’ve done, and we’re going to continue to get better and better as the well-oiled machine we are.”