Working at the Rec Center for Tarleton State University, more times than not I have heard how great it would be to have a special day or time for specific people to come into the Rec Center. I’m sure some of you are asking, what I mean by that? Well, not everyone can come during the slow hours to get their full workout in so they have to settle for what they can get during the busy hours.
The busiest hours fall during the weekdays (Monday-Thursday) with numbers steady reaching over 400 patrons using the facility per hour during the times of 3 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Now that doesn’t count the random high number hours throughout the week before 3 p.m. that even reach 400-500 patrons before dropping to the 200-300’s just to spike up during prime hours. Because of these prime hours, I think it would help increase customer satisfaction overall and help the patrons enjoy themselves better.
Something that could possibly be implemented is scheduling times during the week or month perhaps that allow only certain patrons to enter. What I mean by certain patron’s are the students, faculty, and the staff. The scheduled group will have the whole Rec Center at their disposal to use. During this time, that designated group will be allowed to use the facility however they please, meaning no other groups may enter during that time frame.
Students obviously outweigh the faculty and staff. More times than not, I have seen where the faculty and staff will butt heads with the students because each thinks they deserve a certain spot in the Rec Center. For example, we’ve had faculty come in and reserve a court for badminton. During that scheduled time, the students are often just getting out of class and coming into the Rec Center to play basketball. Now, with our Rec Center, we only have three courts available. Court one is always free for basketball. Court two is set aside for the professors playing badminton and court three is used for volleyball. Tarleton State University has around 12,000 students and about 500 faculty members. not all use the Rec Center, but you can tell students far outweigh the faculty. What this means is that just using the courts as an example from earlier. The students often try to push the faculty to the side to have more court space to play basketball. This causes tension between the two because if the faculty didn’t reserve the court, the rule the Rec staff uses is majority rules. Meaning if basketball has enough for 3 courts versus faculty only using. The Rec staff would kick off the faculty so basketball can have more people playing and rotating in. Since the faculty does have a reservation nothing can change so the students must wait until it is their team's turn to play.
Seeing that faculty is far out numbered by the students, it would be very beneficiary to them to have their own time at the gym. At Tarleton State University, where I work, the faculty knows the best times to come in but they can’t always utilize this time because they have their job to do first. So for the ones who can’t utilize that free time, they are forced to come in during the busy hours when most students are done with classes and also using the facility. Now the faculty doesn’t use up half the space of the students simply because there are fewer faculty than students. This being said, the only problem with having the Rec Center open for the day to them is that most of the day, the Rec Center wouldn’t have anyone utilizing the time. Unless of course more faculty came in during that time because of the time given to them. For the Rec Center to have the best outcome, the Rec Center staff would have to be careful planning and using every resource to reach out to the faculty of Tarleton State to best predict what the total numbers would be for that day.
To implement something like this, it would take months of careful planning and also reaching out to the students and faculty of Tarleton State University. It would have to be carefully advertised through social media, word of mouth, and even put onto posters inside the Rec Center so the patron’s may actually vote on it. The best way to figure out what times best suit the students and faculty would be through a survey they would have to fill out individually. This survey would allow them to pick the best time during the day as well as the specific day of the week that best works for them. After about 2 weeks of taking surveys, they will be taken up and counted. Then the professional staff would tally what time and day has the most votes. The Rec staff would then decide the starting week and then share it through social media, word of mouth and posters around the Rec Center.
After the final numbers are in and counted. The final date would be set for the first day for the faculty/staff or students and then see how it goes and what happens. If the outcome results in a positive feedback then it could possibly be implemented for a more permanent date.
References
(B. Mills, personal communication, March 23, 2017).
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