CADEN HAYNOR ASST. NEWS EDITOR

The Palomar Health Student Wellness Center officially opened its doors to the USD community on April 22.  Jason Wu/The USD Vista

On April 22, approximately 800 USD students, staff and community members gathered in anticipation as USD opened its Palomar Health Student Wellness Center in a ribbon cutting ceremony. 

USD President James T. Harris III and CEO of Palomar Health Diane Hansen cut the ribbon together, opening the Wellness Center to a wave of students eager to explore the new building. The  Wellness  Center has multiple rooms on three floors, all designed to meet a different student wellness need. The entire building includes 79,000 square feet of indoor space and 69,000 square feet of outdoor space. There are dedicated weight and cardio rooms, a juice bar, an esports lounge and flexible rooms for physical training classes. It is also the new home to the Counseling Center and the Center for Health and Wellness Promotion. Kimmel Yeager, Executive  Director  of  the Palomar Health Student Wellness Center, explained what the Wellness Center adds to the USD campus.

“It blends physical fitness, mental restoration, social connection, art therapy, olfactory wellness and health education into a single destination,” Yeager stated. “With spaces for meditation, sleep health, movement classes and community engagement, the wellness center adds to the wellness services that were already being offered, and provides  students  with additional tools to promote healthy    habits   for  years  to come.”

Students were also heavily involved in the entire process of creating the Wellness Center. Yeager explained the extent of student involvement in the making, marketing and maintaining of the Wellness Center.

“From initial focus groups to feedback surveys, student input directly influenced space planning, equipment selection and program offerings,” Yeager explained. “Student employees and leaders were also essential in the lead-up to the opening — supporting everything from branding and messaging to hands-on logistics and hospitality training. This center is truly by students, for students. Our student employees participated in over 25 hours of training specific to the opening of the Wellness Center to help students navigate the new space and provide top-notch hospitality.”

The third floor has fitness rooms, split  into a room for cardio and a room for strength training. Sofia Kartel, a USD first-year who frequented the treadmill at the Bradford Lee Bosley Fitness Center, shared her experience with the new cardio room.

“Something that I really appreciate about the cardio room is that they have the huge glass windows,” Kartel said. “At Bosley, I would always go there and wait a while, like 10 minutes, for the treadmill that was in front of the window so that I wouldn’t have to look at the ground or at the TVs. Sometimes exercise can be stressful, so I appreciate being able to look at happy things while I am running.”

Gavin Kerr, a USD first-year who uses the strength machines six times a week, explained his experience with the new gym compared to the previous gyms on campus.

“There is a lot more variety in the new fitness center because they have more room for other forms of fitness recreation such as the outdoor spaces with the soccer field and the volleyball court which they did not have in the other two gyms,” Kerr explained. “It’s definitely a less monotonous experience for me because it means I can have more variety in my week when I am planning a workout instead of strictly sticking to weights.”

These rooms are meant to form a complete gym space and replace the previous gyms on campus, the Bosley Fitness Center and the Jenny Craig Pavilion (JCP), which will transition to new spaces. The Bosley  Fitness  Center will reopen as the new home for Outdoor Adventures in the Fall of 2025, and the JCP space will become a multi-use space for USD Athletics.

Some frequenters of the previous gyms on campus were disappointed at certain aspects of the new gym. Maddy Li, a USD first-year student, goes to the gym daily and expressed her disappointment in the new workout area.

“I was honestly disappointed because I was expecting a really big workout area, and the gym in the Wellness Center is so small,” Li stated. “Even though they just opened the gym, there are only half the attachments for the cable machines compared to what there was in the other gyms. There are literally only two cables in the entire gym. There’s also only one leg press, one hip thrust machine, and the machines don’t max out at the same weight they did before.”

The third floor of the building has a rejuvenation lounge with individual napping pods for students to rest in as well as a group fitness room. An esports lounge is located on that floor as well, with multiple complete personal computer setups that any student can log into and play games on. The lounge will be open to all students during hours of service.  There is also a fully equipped teaching kitchen that will hold cooking classes in the future. The food option in the Center is a juice bar, named Crush Juice Co., and is located next to the kitchen. Some students appreciate the new addition to campus and the new option to consider when getting food. Kartel gave her opinion on the new juice bar.

“Even though the prices are a bit expensive, like five dollars for an orange juice is asking a bit much, I still think Crush is awesome,” Kartel stated. “I like the juice that is available, and I don’t stand for Crush hate I’ve heard around campus.”

Some students are not as satisfied with the implementation of this food option.

Aurora MacDonald, a first-year student-athlete at USD, expressed her dislike of the juice bar.

“The lines at the juice bar are way too long, and the juice has too much ice and not enough fruit, so it’s way too watery,” MacDonald explained.

The second floor holds rooms for fitness, a lounge, a locker room and offices. The counseling department is set to move into those offices out of their old ones in the University Center. 

The first floor is almost completely outside. The first part, accessible from the inside, is the Multipurpose Athletic Indoor Court. This court is accessible for basketball, volleyball and other indoor-court sports. The outer portion of the Wellness Center has a beach volleyball court and a small-sized turf soccer field. Here, crowds of students can congregate to play various sports and socialize at the tables around the action. 

Next to the soccer field is an outdoor gym area with equipment for lifting, monkey bars and a bouldering wall. Jaziel Mayoral, a senior at USD, gave his opinion after using the outdoor gym equipment.

“I  think  it was a good idea that  they  added the outside gym,” Mayoral stated. “They could change some things to optimize what you can do outside, like the way they set up the bars so that you can swing from one to the other. Right now, it’s very limited because they’re either too small or too big, there’s no in between and there’s no lower bars for people to practice on.”

Andre Suide, a sophomore at USD who plays soccer on the outdoor field and uses the outdoor gym, expressed his appreciation for the outdoor workout facilities.

“The outside gym is based,” Suide explained. “I am never working out inside again. I love the fact that there is an outdoor area for exercising, so that I can play soccer and breathe the fresh air.”

As the Wellness Center continues to be open and as students populate it for the rest of the school year, the USD community will continue to access and assess this new addition to campus.

USD’s President Harris and Palomar Health CEO Diane Hansen cut the ribbon together to open the facility.  Photo courtesy of @usandiego/Flickr