A common dilemma many students face when beginning their college careers out of high school is figuring out how to stay in shape while adjusting to a new schedule.
The Student Activities Center’s fitness center offers a variety of different activities to help keep students in shape, including an accessible weight room stocked with treadmills, free and machine weight systems and other cardiovascular equipment.
“In the Louisville Metropolitan area, this [SAC] is one of the best facilities around,” Ken Carey, gym employee, said. “The vast array of equipment and stuff that this facility has here along with the facilities at the Crawford and Humana, it can’t be beat.”
The SAC is open weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and is free with an active student ID.
The SAC fitness center also provides five racquetball courts, two squash courts and complete locker room facilities along with four multi-purpose gym floors which are used for basketball, volleyball and badminton.
“It offers pretty much everything you want,” Greg Welsh, junior nursing major, said. “They have a gym, basketball courts, racquetball and they’re always open when you need them to be so it’s pretty convenient.”
For those looking to keep themselves occupied in some competitive form or just looking for a way to blow off some steam without all the sweat, the Cardinal Corner might be the answer. Also located in the SAC, the Cardinal Corner provides an assortment of free games for students to compete in, including pool, ping-pong, air hockey and foosball.
The Ralph Wright Natatorium, located on the corner of Warnock Ave. and Floyd St., is one for the newest facilities on campus and allows students a chance to swim in an Olympic-size pool. The Natatorium is also home to the U of L’s men’s and women’s swim teams and is complete with an eight-lane, 50 meter competition pool with depth ranging from four feet, six inches to 18 feet.
“It’s really a great facility,” Matt Blanford, graduate student and lifeguard, said. “It’s brand new and I think students are surprised when they find out that it’s even here and they’re allowed to use it for free.”
The Natatorium is open from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and is also open at various times on weekends.
The Humana Gym is another facility available for students looking to work out. Located on Bradley Ave. and Eastern Pkwy., the Humana Gym offers complete weight and cardiovascular rooms, dry heat saunas and gym floors are available when not used for club practices. Free for students, the Humana Gym is open from 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.
U of L also offers a variety of different sports clubs and intramural league sports which provide students looking for a more structured plan to help maintain a healthy lifestyle, a solid solution while satisfying their competitive juices.
With clubs like badminton, fencing, gymnastics and many others, students are given the opportunity to compete while receiving a chance to learn a new sport or continuing to play a familiar one. There are also many different intramural league sports students can play including football, basketball, and soccer.
As students' participation in Facebook grows, so does my curiosity as to why many of my straight classmates find entertainment in listing their relationship status as "In a Relationship with..." or "Married to..." another straight person of the same sex. For those unfamiliar, Facebook is a free social networking Web site -- a sort of ‘Myspace.com' for the college crowd – where users can interact with other people in a particular city or school. Each user can edit a personal profile with as much about themselves as they wish, including relationship status and a link to the profile of a spouse or lover.
As you have likely heard this year's freshmen class is larger, smarter and sexier than you. They bring ACT scores that trump the national and state average and 50 more members than last year's class. The University of Louisville has approximately 2600 freshmen this year, 62 percent of whom live in campus residence halls which hold 3300 students. After repeated years of incoming freshman class growth, it's easy to see why The Louisville Cardinal reported students living in study lounges.
In the world of academic political debate, everything is abstract. White guys with three houses and two ex-wives pontificate about the deepest issues of our lives without ever coming down to look at these issues. Chances are these debates don't really touch the lives of most politicians. This is what leads to such extremism in both the left and right direction. I would bet that President Bush hasn't counseled many young women about whether to terminate their pregnancy.
2:15 p.m., sitting in class with a painful distraction: plumber's crack. The professor is preaching about something very crucial to a student's academics. However this outrageous calamity is in view. The exposed girl is very nice and certainly fashionable and trendy. But gravity, as it tends to do, has slipped its sneaky thumbs into her belt loops and created this unfortunate spectacle.
The University of Louisville Student Government Association's first senate meeting last Tuesday could have been better. Although it wasn't a lack of enthusiasm or exhaustion from the first week of school, yet the lack of attention U of L's student body was receiving. The members of the Student Senate did not follow the Executive Cabinet's lead in supporting students' needs.
Over the past several years the complaints surrounding food services on Belknap campus were primarily three-fold: not enough options, too few locations, and too few hours.
When bringing the new dining service Sodexo to campus, the Student Government Association and faculty members alike made sure these issues were resolved.
Like the other makeovers around the University of Louisville, their promotional items have changed too. The Times New Roman font of the former U of L logo is now replaced with Delta Jaeger. Who can blame them for the new logo that was released earlier this year? That thick, sans-serif-like font can catch a student or visitor's eye.
I am dismayed at the carelessness of many cyclists on campus who are chaining their bikes to ramp handrails. These ramps are meant for two purposes - to facilitate loading into buildings and to provide motor-impaired individuals with equal building access.
The University of Louisville listened. Ah, finally some attention. They listened to the grumbles of stomachs and the voices of a concerned student body. Changes to U of L's food service provider, from Chartwell's to Sodexo, is a positive step forward in the right direction.
