Tue. Feb 18th, 2025

Respect Shirk Center

Kinzie Schweigert
Sports Editor

Whether you are an athlete, non-athlete, veteran or newbie to the Shirk Athletic Center, you should know about the heinous “Shirk Crimes” being committed every single day at Illinois Wesleyan University’s beloved gym.

If you have visited other schools or played them in athletic events, you have seen firsthand that Shirk is a top-notch facility in comparison.

Even some Division I schools cannot hold a candle to Shirk, and yet students here at IWU take it for granted.
At any given moment during the day, you could walk into the Shirk weight room and see proof of this negligence. What exactly are the crimes to look for?

For starters, the Shirk workers are not there to clean up after you. So when you have finished with a weight, be it dumbbell or plate weight, put it back where you found it.

This is a simple courtesy that all students should have learned in preschool. If you missed that day of preschool, please take the time to give yourself a refresher.

Nothing is more frustrating than being mid-workout and having to clean up after someone else’s last lift. If you’re in the mood to hang clean and you see that the last people to use the bars left 70 pounds of weight on each side of the bar, just stripping the bar is a workout in and of itself.

Not only is neglecting to strip the bar when you’re done an annoyance to everyone, it also leaves our weight room looking sloppy and mediocre.

This is not the respect that Shirk deserves. Leave the weights and dumbbells in their proper places.
Outside of the weight room, more “Shirk Crimes” continue. It is not the Shirk workers’ job to organize the equipment room every minute of the day.

For Pete’s sake, hang up your jump ropes, stack the orange hurdles and put the ladders back where you found them. It is beyond frustrating to spend ten minutes untangling the bands or searching every drawer for cones.

The IWU track team would most likely appreciate putting the jump boxes and hurdles back in their places. The coaches of all our teams would love to stop wasting practice time looking for equipment.

Imagine a day when none of these crimes occurred. Maybe it wouldn’t be all that groundbreaking, but maybe there wouldn’t be 25-pound dumbbells missing and broken machines.

If everyone would respect Shirk, it could stay the place that it was meant to be. So next time you finish a workout, wipe your sweaty butt mark off the seat, clear off the platform and hang up your equipment.

It’s that simple.

By admin

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