A look inside Wagner Athletes’ Second Home

As a member of Wagner's women's lacrosse team, I spend a lot of my time in the Spiro Sports Center. Almost everything you need as a student athlete is in Spiro which makes it very convenient. Between the locker rooms, coaches offices, training room, swimming pool, basketball arena, and both the fitness and strength gyms all in this one building, you almost never need to leave. The only parts of athletics that are separate from Spiro are the stadium, tennis courts, and softball/baseball fields.

The two gyms in Spiro are the fitness center and the strength room. The first floor gym is the fitness center, which is open to everybody on campus. It contains brand new cardio equipment including treadmills, ellipticals, bicycles, and motion trainers. You can also find a number of strength training machines, dumbbells, barbell racks, medicine balls, and exercise balls. It even includes a matted area for people to do core or other floor exercises.

I mainly use the cardio equipment in the fitness center and I use the other gym for weight training. The strength room is located in the basement of Spiro and is restricted to athletics use only. It is lined wall to wall with bar bell racks, plate weights, dumb bells, kettle bells, medicine balls, and resistance bands. This gym is run by Wagner's strength and conditioning coaches: Joe Varga, Max Barnhart, Alex Brunson, Marisa Gaynor, Logan Moody, and Bennett Reed. Each sports team is assigned a strength coach and is given a time slot 2-3 days a week for their team lift sessions. The lifts generally run about an hour and include weight and agility training. The strength coaches really push us during these sessions and critique our technique to ensure that we get the most out of it.

Another place where I spend a lot of time in Spiro is the athletic training room. I recently tore my ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), so I am constantly in the training room doing physical therapy. The training room is run by the head athletic trainer, Andrew Levine. The rest of the athletic training staff includes Julie Flantzer, Alex Lipcius, Nick Schmidt, Raymond Stiles, and Briana Stevens. Each athletic trainer is assigned to two or more teams. The trainers work with the players of their assigned teams, supplying them with treatment and physical therapy exercises if they are injured. My team (women's lacrosse) is assigned to Raymond Stiles. The training room has ice baths, heating pads, and foam rollers for when athletes are sore, tired, or tight. Athletes can even go to their trainers when they are feeling sick and need to check their temperature, receive cold medicine, etc.

Team locker rooms are also in Spiro. My team meets in our locker room before every practice and game to prepare, focus, and listen to music. We even go to the locker room early to hang out and relax on the bean bags. There is also a laundry basket in every locker room. Athletics has a loop laundry system where each person clips all of their dirty apparel and gear onto a loop. Each player then leaves their loop in their teams laundry basket and on specific days their laundry will be done and returned to the locker room.

The basketball arena where our men's and women's basketball teams play is also in Spiro. The arena can seat up to 2,100 spectators. Our six lane, 25 yard, NCAA regulation size swimming pool, where our men's and women's water polo teams, and our swim team compete is in Spiro as well.

Spiro is the home of athletics for Wagner College. I love that everything is all in one building because besides being convenient, it makes it feel like we are all one family since we're around each other all of the time.