U of R gym facilities not ready to reopen

Students and community members will have to wait a while longer before they can hit their on-campus gym again.

The University of Regina’s recreation facilities will not be reopening quite yet.

Dr. Harold Riemer, dean of the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the U of R, said strict reopening guidelines and additional requirements due to COVID-19 are preventing the facilities from reopening for the time being.

“The restrictions related to the Phase 3 opening … they’re a challenge for us in terms of the limits,” Riemer said. “It depends on the nature of the exercise people are engaging in.”

Riemer said significant physical distancing requirements and the implementation of a booking system for gym users present obstacles to the university reopening its facilities.

“The difference is depending on the exertion level undertaken,” Riemer said. “You have to be six feet (away) if you’re minimally exerting yourself. If you’re more vigorously exerting yourself, it has to be twice that distance.”

With the U of R also effectively closed to public gatherings and events, Riemer noted the concern about bringing people back on campus to use the gym.

“We’re not even holding in-person classes,” he said. “It makes it difficult to say on one hand, ‘Hey, we’re not going to have classes,’ but on the other hand, ‘Come and work out.’

“Trying to make sure that we would meet all those restrictions and still be able to offer something meaningful to students and/or community members makes it really challenging for us.”

Riemer said if the facility was to reopen at this time, much of its equipment would be shut down due to its close proximity.

“It’s not that we have a small facility. We actually have quite a big facility but 15 people in that and then to monitor their activities is pretty difficult,” he said.

Another consideration is the university’s reduction of available entrances to campus and creating a new system to allow gym users to register for a time to work out.

“We’d want to have something in place so people don’t show up here and are told, ‘Sorry, you can’t come in because we have too many people here right now,’ ” Riemer said.

The U of R campus remains mostly closed even to students at this time, as classes during the summer months are being offered completely online.

“The summer semester is all remote delivery so we don’t actually have any in-person classes going on on this campus at all, not even small ones. And the same thing is going to happen in the fall,” Riemer said.

Without students present on campus, Riemer said the primary concern would be bringing a large student presence back to the university with COVID-19 concerns still prevalent.

“Do we want to bring people onto campus or a lot of people onto campus and open up the campus community and heighten the risk, especially when we’re only at Phase 3 and we’ve only just begun that phase?” he wondered.

“We would be concerned with (contributing) to going backwards and not going forwards in terms of the reopening.”

While the gym facilities will not be reopening for the foreseeable future, the continued closure means a weight lifted from students’ and community members’ wallets.

University recreation fees have been removed from student tuition for the summer semester and will likely not be reapplied in the fall. Likewise, community users of the U of R’s facilities have not been charged while they remain unable to use their memberships.

“We use those revenues to do a lot of things but certainly one of them is to ensure we can staff and run and manage the fitness centre,” Riemer explained. “We don’t have those fees coming in.”