Athletes from Quincy University are adapting to the consequences of there not being enough room on campus to house and support athletic practice and competition. This lack of space is leading to lower athletic performance and achievement.

Quincy University is not providing enough space in facilities on campus for several of its sports to thrive. This lack of space causes setbacks for athletes in their sports, making the competition all that much harder. Teams such as the swim team, track and field, wrestling, golf and football are all at the mercy of inadequate facilities.

Quincy University’s swim team already deals with the ramifications of not enough space. The pool is considered too small by some swimmers’ standards, such as swimmer Angelina Pagliaccio.

The pool hosts six lanes compared to the traditional eight, this causes the team to split into four groups that practice at different times of the day. To add to the dilemma, the pool is considered shallow, five feet being the deepest point, in comparison to other universities with a pool in the Great Lakes Valley Conference at an average of eight feet. The shallow pool causes a lot of swimmers to hit their heads on the bottom of the pool when diving.

In a similar manner the pool deck is also lacking in capacity, with only enough area to host two teams, and hardly any room for spectators. Most spectators are forced to watch from one of two windows. The first being from the gym a wall over, but half of the window is covered by wrestling mats that are bolted to the wall. The second window has a view from above in the weight room, but when sitting up there spectators block the equipment that athletes train with, affecting their workout.

One of the only notable pros of the university’s pool, is the fact that there is one on campus in comparison to some of the universities in the conference that do not have one.

“It was definitely a challenge but I am just happy we have a pool on campus,” Pagliaccio said.

The wrestling team also faces its own set of challenges coinciding with lack of facility space. Many new recruits are enticed with the promise of a new wrestling room, yet when asked when a new facility is going to be established, administrators give vague responses. Easton Norris, a senior at QU, was at the university when the program first started. In the beginning the school had a wrestling room two blocks off campus in the basement of a renovated elementary school. Availability of that room that was lost at the end of the 2023-2024 wrestling season. Since then wrestlers have had to roll out mats in the university’s Health and Fitness Center. 

“We were promised to have a facility be built by this year actually, which obviously has not happened. It feels like we don’t have a home on campus,” Norris said.

The HFC, while meant to house athletic competition and practices, is not big enough to house as many sports as the university offers. Wrestling and women’s basketball both practice in the early parts of the morning before the HFC officially opens. This often results in athletes such as Kaylee Luker, out in the cold at 5:30 a.m. during the winter months risking getting sick waiting for doors to be unlocked by coaches.

“It’s really inconvenient to wait out in the cold, and it’s dark. I feel like I’ve been forgotten,” Luker said.

While this is an addressable problem with limited space on campus, the solution is harder to come by. A more obvious answer would be to find more space adding to campus but the university is encased by the surrounding town leaving the next viable option of finding space already on campus. Any area on campus that would fit a facility large enough to accommodate activity room is already used by students and the community during public events. Sacrifices will need to be made in any situation, but it all depends on how much the school is willing to give up.