Q&A about UNC Charlotte’s New Outdoor Exercise Facility
The new outdoor exercise facility, known as C.O.R.E. (Calisthenics Outdoor Recreation Equipment), opened on campus on September 26, after several years of planning by four UNC Charlotte students in conjunction with on and off campus partners. They are Alex Caviness ’20, Esteban Mendieta ’18, Gabriella Kroska ’18, and Matt Lowry ‘18.
All four students are members of the Levine Scholars Program and as part of their participation in the program, they each have an allotment of grant funds to put toward a project to improve their communities. These scholars decided to pool their funds to meet a need that they saw on campus: more diverse exercise options. The completed C.O.R.E. is located near Belk Hall on the greenway.
Now, who better to explain this whole process than one of the founders himself? Alex Caviness is the youngest of the group and the only current student on campus to see the inauguration of C.O.R.E. from the student perspective. He’s a senior Mechanical Engineering and Music double-major and has overseen the last steps of the process right up through the inauguration event.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit more about how the C.O.R.E. project got started?
A: The actual inception of the project predates me because the other three people had the idea for the space as much as a year or two before I got to campus, but when I joined the project they had finished finalizing some of that stuff, and were getting ready to do some of the actual grant writing and budgeting stuff. Esteban and Matt had the original idea, and then they got Gabriella on it pretty quickly, and they just went for it brainstorming.
Q: Where did the C.O.R.E. name come from?
A: We brainstormed names for a while and had been working on a bunch of filler names for a while. Then we had an actual brainstorming session and started looking for something that acroynymed well and that conveyed the idea that it is an outdoor alternative exercise option. Once we came up with that, it stuck pretty much instantly.
Q: Now, I have to ask: what does Calisthenics actually mean?
A: Well, I think of it as body weight exercises.
Q: So, I understand this has been a long process, can you tell me more about the steps you and the other scholars had to go through to get C.O.R.E. built on campus?
A: Starting at the early stages of planning it, we concurrently talked with the people who work in facilities on campus and recreation on campus to see about how we could get additional funding — it should be noted that the scholars spent $32,000 of grant money allocated by the Levines, but the project itself could be priced at $200,000 if we had actually paid full price for everything for a few different reasons. We talked to two different people about getting the thing built. The first would had been catalogue equipment, which would have been a fair chunk of change, but it would have been way more than we actually ended up spending, which was about 30k. We ended up doing it though UCS, a manufacturing company. With them, we got custom built through designs that we created. Esteban actually made all the 3D models for the parts. When it got manufactured, they made a few edits for feasibility. And, since they had been thinking about starting to have items like this sort of modular calisthenics type stuff, they ended up giving us a discount of about 2/3 on what it would be to get a custom equipment made. There was a lot of groundwork to be done, the turf would have been pretty expensive, but somebody in facilities was able to help us with that. What I can say, is that it was actually significantly more than that 32k from Levine, so we had to talk to a lot of other people about how to get the additional costs cover as well as the future maintenance done.
After that, we had to negotiate between several different locations for the spaces. Originally it was going to be by the SAC, then it was going to be by that little ditch near the engineering part of campus, then it ended up being moved to where it is now. Just the manufacturing itself was a big deal because it had gotten delayed for a pretty long time because they had other projects they were doing, so we weren’t at the top of their priority, since they do projects like for the Olympics and stuff.
And then it was supposed to get installed in the spring and then it was super rainy and it’s in a floodplain, so that also helped to delay it to the point where it took 4 something years. And actually, kind of surprisingly, the bureaucratic process was actually not one of them.
Q: How did you feel at its inauguration?
A: I thought it was a lot of fun — UREC organized an opening event with free tee shirts and they had some sample workouts. They actually did a little challenge circuit and people could win swag by doing exercises as quickly as possible. I thought it was a great way to open the space officially and I think it turned out really great. I was actually pretty surprised about how many people were already lined up outside of it when I arrived.
