Lehman Fam­ily Train­ing Cen­ter Still on Sched­ule to Fin­ish

MISHAWAKA--De­spite the COVID-19 pan­demic, the new Lehman Fam­ily Train­ing Cen­ter is still sched­uled to be com­pleted by De­cem­ber 2020.  

“We have just started tak­ing down power to the area so we can cut down trees for the new build­ing,” Phys­i­cal Plant Di­rec­tor Joe Zap­pia wrote in an email. 

Ac­cord­ing to the Bethel Uni­ver­sity web­site, the pro­ject has raised $3.5 mil­lion so far. The pro­ject needs $400,000 more to fully fund the pro­ject. 

Danny Wilk­er­son, Bethel track and field head coach, said the pro­ject is some­thing he has been ad­vo­cat­ing for 14 years. 

“Right now, ath­let­ics is over­whelmed in our cur­rent fa­cil­i­ties and the stu­dents suf­fer from it,” Wilk­er­son said in a phone in­ter­view. 

One of the main ad­di­tions to the ath­letic de­part­ment that the new fa­cil­ity will bring is an in­door track. The track will stretch 200 me­ters but will not be a full cir­cle. It will be uti­lized for track and field prac­tices, but not for com­pe­ti­tions.  For most of its his­tory, the track and field pro­gram has not had an ad­e­quate prac­tice area.  

The train­ing cen­ter will also con­tain a weight room area with squat racks, lift­ing plat­forms, a dumb­bell rack and multi-func­tion benches. The re­main­ing fundrais­ing money will be used to pur­chase the weight-room equip­ment. 

As for the build­ing con­struc­tion, the Grounds and Main­te­nance De­part­ment is work­ing with sev­eral lo­cal com­pa­nies. De­sign Col­lab­o­ra­tive of Fort Wayne de­signed the struc­ture of the build­ing. DJ Con­struc­tion of Goshen will be build­ing the struc­ture. Hill Ex­ca­vat­ing of Mishawaka is work­ing on ex­ca­vat­ing.  Dy­namic Me­chan­i­cal of Mishawaka and Gay­lor Elec­tric Elkhart are work­ing on heat­ing, cool­ing, plumb­ing and elec­tri­cal. 

“I do know the biggest hold-up, if you want to call it a hold-up, is wait­ing on the pre­fab steel shell to ar­rive” Wilk­er­son said. “It has been or­dered and its cur­rently be­ing sup­pos­edly built and then we’re wait­ing for it to be shipped and then erected.” 

While wait­ing for the pre­fab steel shell to ar­rive, Wilk­er­son said the con­struc­tion team will start lay­ing down the con­crete foun­da­tion. The pre­fab steel shell is be­ing used for the beams, ceil­ing, roof and walls. 

When im­ages of what the fa­cil­ity would look like were re­leased on­line, ques­tions arose over the lo­ca­tion of the site. The im­ages sug­gested the fa­cil­ity would be built over the prac­tice fields on the south side of cam­pus. 

But Wilk­er­son said the fa­cil­ity will not be re­duc­ing the size of or re­plac­ing any other fa­cil­ity. 

“Just to make sure every­body un­der­stands that this is­n’t af­fect­ing any other fields on cam­pus,” Wilk­er­son said. “Whether it’s the rugby train­ing fa­cil­ity or their prac­tice field…none of that stuff is be­ing af­fected. It’s tucked right along the fence, go­ing right back to what was once old prairie.”  

When the fa­cil­ity is fin­ished, one of the goals is to in­crease stu­dent-ath­lete en­roll­ment by 200 stu­dents over three years. To ac­com­plish this goal, the promise of the new fa­cil­ity is be­ing used as a re­cruit­ing tool. 

“It’s been pretty en­cour­ag­ing now that we can re­cruit based on the fact, we’re a Christ-cen­tered pro­gram with a win­ning tra­di­tion that will have a state-of-the-art train­ing fa­cil­ity,” Wilk­er­son said. “It just has a nice ring to it and has al­ready made a huge dif­fer­ence in the cal­iber of kids that are will­ing to talk to us [and] win­ning some of the 50-50’s be­tween other schools who have fa­cil­i­ties that we never did.” 

Not only will the ath­let­ics pro­gram ben­e­fit from the new fa­cil­ity, but also aca­d­e­mic pro­grams. Ac­cord­ing to a flyer about the new fa­cil­ity, an­other goal is to ex­pand the Ki­ne­si­ol­ogy De­part­ment. The de­part­ment in­cludes ma­jors such as pre-phys­i­cal ther­apy, ath­letic train­ing and sport man­age­ment. 

Wilk­er­son gave credit to Zap­pia and Bethel Chief Fi­nan­cial Of­fi­cer Jerry White for be­ing the main li­ai­son to the con­trac­tors in­volved. He also ex­tended praise to Pres­i­dent Gregg Chenoweth and the cab­i­net for be­liev­ing in the pro­ject. 

“It’s been pretty much all hands-on deck from mul­ti­ple lev­els of the cab­i­net and ath­letic de­part­ment,” Wilk­er­son said. “I would say if there’s any­body di­rectly [who helped], it would be the donors. With­out the donors, none of this can hap­pen.” 

If any­one is in­ter­ested in do­nat­ing to­wards the new fa­cil­ity, in­ter­ested par­ties can fill out this giv­ing form.