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Friday, March 29, 2024
NEWS  |  CAMPUS

UF RecSports tracks student, visitor gym habits with every entry

UF RecSports is keeping up with the pace of college gyms around the nation. 

College recreational facilities are keeping track of visitor habits and adjusting their programming and activities based on their findings, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

And UF is no exception.

RecSports is following who uses its facilities and how frequently they do so. 

“When we opened the Student Recreation & Fitness Center in 1991, on day one over there, we started counting how many students were in each area of the building each hour,” said David Bowles, director of the department of recreational sports at UF. “Now, in the last four years, we’ve been able to do more because of the software that we have.”

Pamela Hightower, the assistant director for administrative services at RecSports, said that the amount and frequency of students using the facilities is recorded every time a student enters a gym or interacts online with his or her GatorLink account.

Every person is only counted once, no matter how many times he or she visits the gym.

Hightower said there were more than 36,000 unique visitors to the facilities in 2013-2014. That only includes the Student Recreation & Fitness Center, Southwest Recreation Center and the Broward Outdoor Recreation Complex, but not Lake Wauburg or any of the recreational fields on campus.

“We can see the trends and behaviors,” Hightower said, “so we adjust our programming so that we’re not investing money in something that doesn’t seem to be what students are behaviorally interested in, and we put it into something that they are.”

RecSports is using the data to improve students’ exercise experience.  

“For one, it impacts learning. So you got people coming to college to learn, exercise directly impacts learning,” Bowles said. “It also has an effect on anxiety, depression, ADHD, addiction … the exercise has a direct impact on students’ abilities to be successful.”

[A version of this story ran on page 8 on 10/31/2014]

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