This new year at Prep leads to not only new students, but more importantly, new locker rooms! The long-awaited locker rooms are finally finished as construction for the new lobby of McHugh Gym and the boys and girls’ locker rooms started last spring. The morning of September 20^th, 2019 the locker rooms and lobby were filled with curious students finally seeing the impressive design of these new school features.

The locker rooms and lobby were overdue to be redone as Mr. Stearns said, “The school has recognized for a while that the locker rooms were inadequate, the girl’s locker room was a visitors locker room from when it was an all-boys school.”

He went on to say how there was an inequality because of how much smaller the girl’s locker rooms were, the gym lobby had been dark, and the training room was way too small. To improve them the boys and girl’s locker rooms were designed to be the same size to the foot. The lobby was redesigned to be very bright and open, and Kate Madison the athletic trainer  designed the training room herself.

Mr. Stearns was especially impressed with how these new features turned out as he said, “Wait until you see them, they are fabulous and absolutely beautiful…they are big, and they are clean.”

All the students have been extremely excited for these locker rooms, especially the student-athletes who have falls sports. Many of these students have had to change in bathrooms or other rooms that have been used for accommodating not having locker rooms. This led to the rooms to overcrowd with the number of athletes and take a long time due to waiting. Sophomore Ave Kitonia said, “I’m super excited for the new locker rooms and think that they are going to be really helpful for all of the athletes in the upcoming seasons.”

Along with the new locker rooms, there were men’s and women’s faculty locker rooms added, a redone hall of fame, and the “dungeon” was taken out and a hallway was added directly to the back field. This adds better accessibility to the field from the locker rooms. One of the most noteworthy additions to the locker rooms are the TVs, “The TVs are an amazing opportunity for teams to further develop their communication,” Said Lizzie Kaiser ‘22.

Prep is so glad to finally have these facilities up and running for another amazing and memorable school year.