With five fitness facilities spread across campus, there are plenty of places for Villanova students, faculty and staff to get in a good workout across campus. The largest, most well-equipped and highly-frequented of these spaces is the Davis Center for Athletics and Fitness, located on the third floor of the athletics complex across from the Finneran Pavilion. 

While many students love the Davis Center for its open spaces, plentiful variety of machines and its sizable inventory of weightlifting equipment, its operating hours can seem relatively restrictive to many students.

“I’m involved in many different extracurriculars and leadership boards, and on top of classes, it can be difficult sometimes to find a time to go during the day,” sophomore Mike Ferlisi, a Davis regular, said. “And it’s equally frustrating that the times when I regularly could go, Davis is closed. It doesn’t make sense to me that Davis shouldn’t be open 24 hours. Other gyms manage to run 24 hours just fine. I don’t see how Davis is an exception.”

However, this sort of operation practice for the Davis Center or other campus gyms does not seem to fit within the University’s plans for the space.

“There are several factors which contribute to the current Davis Center Opening Hours,” Lisa Harris, the Senior Associate Athletic Director of Intramurals and Recreation, said. “They include: University funding for staffing, student surveys on preferred workout times, conducted by Student Government, student employee availability and custodial schedules. The industry standard is to provide facility supervision that ensures someone is available and trained to appropriately respond in the event of a medical emergency.”

While the University’s concerns are not invalid, I believe there are ways which the Davis Center could safely operate beyond the currently-staffed hours for the sake of student convenience.

There are safety and security guidelines the University could implement to keep Davis open for 24 hours without needing to hire more staff. Most 24-hour gyms, both small and large, operate on a combination of swipe access and waiver singing to enter, especially at late hours when no staff members are present, something which I believe could be implemented here at Villanova.

In order to access the gym floor at the Davis Center, one already has to swipe their card to get through a set of gates after climbing up to the top floor of the building. Those gates could be fitted with a sign which informs would-be gym goers at late or extremely early hours that the act of swiping in constitutes the waiving of your rights to sue the University in the result of an injury while working out in the unstaffed gym.

 However, with the Davis Center, there is an additional layer of security concern with the fact that it is the headquarters of the University’s basketball programs and houses a treasure trove of important artifacts. In order to access the building at all in a proposed wider operating window, one would need to swipe their Wildcard, just like other buildings on campus.

In regards to potential theft of equipment, the litany of security cameras which likely line that building are there for a reason, it would be massively difficult to steal any piece of equipment without being caught instantly.

If keeping the facilities open for 24 hours is an impossibility, a compromise could be extending the operating windows by an hour or two on each end, that way students who start classes at 8:30 a.m. or have club activities that extend late into the evening would still be able to get in their daily physical activity in during the day without having to sacrifice a meal time or class period to do so.

The Villanova student body as a whole values physical activity. Sometimes, the limited operating hours prevent Villanova community members from getting in that physical activity that we need to focus on the other things we have to do, and keeping the gym open for 24 hours or at least widening the operating hours would allow students more freedom in their workout schedule and would help disperse some of the crowds which form at peak times.