Hiram College begins locker room renovation

When the 2024-25 school year begins for Hiram College, the four locker rooms located outside of Price Gymnasium will have a completely new look. Hiram began his $100,000 summer project to completely renovate the locker rooms, including installing new lockers and floor tiles and redecorating the facility with new designs.

“It’ll be pretty,” athletic director Scott Pohlman told the Weekly Villager on May 29. “For the size of the room, we’ll have between 20 and 25 lockers, and it will look like wood and feel like wood and it will just add a lot to the aesthetic when the recruits and our current athletes come in.

The project began during the last week of the 2023-24 school year, when coaches and student-athletes removed all lockers, benches and tiles. Construction will resume when the new lockers are delivered in July, but everything should be finished before the first week of August.

According to Pohlman, the project is funded primarily by parents of current student-athletes, former students who competed at Hiram and former coaches.

“It shows that their alumni are still invested in Hiram, in athletics and in the sport they participated in and that parents donating money is just a way to give back to their children,” noted Pohlman.

According to Pohlman, the old lockers are donated to the Crestwood school district which will reuse them for its own use.

“There is a sense of community and we are part of the community and it gives us the opportunity to give back to them and it gives them the opportunity to partner with us and in return they get the equipment that they have need,” he added. .

The old lockers were over 30 years old and showed signs of rust and wear. Pohlman said the new lockers are made of a phonetic material that looks like wood but is more like plastic, which will prevent the lockers from rusting from moisture. from the swimming pool adjacent to the changing rooms. Pohlman said the new lockers are expected to be delivered in mid-July and when they arrive, they will be installed immediately.

Hiram will also replace benches with stools in front of each locker and add non-slip flooring to replace the tiles. Each sports team that uses the locker rooms will have the opportunity to personally design the rooms in their own way using school colors.

According to Pohlman, even though Hiram is renovating the locker rooms, it’s also nice to see that the coaches and student-athletes will have a personal hand in this project.

“It creates a sense of pride in their institution when they come back and when they’re on campus now and they take the recruits and tell them this is what we did and this is what we have could accomplish,” he said. “Years later, when they come back to campus with their families, when they take them to the locker rooms, they will be able to say that we were the ones who helped replace and renovate those locker rooms.”

The sports teams that will primarily use the locker rooms are the women’s soccer team, women’s volleyball team, cheer and STUNT team, women’s basketball, and women’s wrestling. Pohlman acknowledged that several teams will still share locker rooms because they compete at different times of the year, but the upgrades will improve the student-athlete experience.

This is another major renovation to Hiram’s athletic facilities, as the school renovated the Steve Belichick Olympic Training Center last winter.

“I’m a big believer in it and when I was playing softball we did a lot of renovations in my first year on the softball field, whether it was building shelves in the closets or installing a system drainage,” Pohlman said. “We asked our athletes to help us because they become owners of the property. It’s their sport, they have to learn how to take care of it and it’s a good learning experience. We had a few players who may have never used some of the power equipment, but we showed them how to use it.