Photo Credit: Paul Richer
Growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, I saw a locker room as a cavernous, uncomfortable, smelly public space whose functional design focused less on personal space and more on efficiently serving a large number of people. The average locker room experience was the same for my dad, and oddly enough, locker rooms had not evolved or improved from his boyhood to mine. The typical recreation center locker rooms were modeled after high school athletic facilities. This “old school” model was accepted as the status quo for decades.
Old-school locker rooms may be our heritage, but recreation facility operators know the critical role modern locker rooms play in increasing participation, streamlining operations, and enhancing customer experience. This once common and forgotten space is now part of progressive business plans that drive design and provide revenue potential. Service-minded professionals recognize the importance of a locker room to the customer, and as a result, ever-evolving and paradigm-shifting locker room design is now at the forefront of recreation center planning.
Deciding what to include in a new community recreation center revolves around activity spaces—i.e., how many gyms, how many lanes in the lap pool, and how many meeting rooms. Rarely, however, does the discussion explore the spaces required to support these activities, in particular the variety and quality of the locker rooms.