When the 2024-25 school year begins for Hiram College, the four locker rooms located outside of the Price Gymnasium will have a whole new look to them. Hiram has begun its $100,000 summer project to completely renovate the locker rooms, including installing new lockers and flooring tiles to redecorating the facilities with new designs.
“It will look nice,” Athletic Director Scott Pohlman told The Weekly Villager on May 29. “For the size of the room, we will have anywhere from 20 to 25 lockers, and it is going to look like wood and feel like wood and will just add a lot to the aesthetics when recruits and our current athletes walk in.”
The project began in the final week of the 2023-24 school year when coaches and student-athletes removed all of the lockers, benches and flooring tiles. Construction will pick up when the new lockers are delivered in July but everything is expected to be completed before the first week of August.
According to Pohlman, the project is being funded mostly by parents of current-student athletes, former alumni who competed at Hiram and past coaches.
“It shows that their alumni is still invested in Hiram and athletics and the sport they participated in and from the parents donating money it is just a way to give back to their kids,” noted Pohlman.
According to Pohlman, the old lockers are being donated to the Crestwood School District who will repurpose them for their own use.
“There is a sense of community and we are part of the community and it gives us an opportunity to give back to them and it gives them an opportunity to partner with us and in return they are getting some equipment that they need,” he added.
The old lockers were more than 30 years old and showed signs of rust and wear and tear and Pohlman said that the new lockers are made of a phonetic material which resembles wood but is more like plastic, which will prevent the lockers rusting because of the moisture from the pool adjacent to the locker rooms. Pohlman said that the new lockers are scheduled to be delivered in the middle of July and as soon as they arrive, they will be immediately installed.
Hiram will also replace the benches with stools in front of each locker and will add non-slip flooring to replace the flooring tiles. Each athletic team that uses the locker rooms will have the opportunity to personally design the rooms in their own unique way using the school colors.
According to Pohlman, as great as it is that Hiram is renovating the locker rooms, it is also nice to see that the coaches and student-athletes will have a personal hand in this project.
“It builds a sense of pride in their facility when they come back and when they are on campus now and taking recruits around saying this is what we did and this is what we were able to accomplish,” he said. “Years down the road, when they come back to campus with their families, when they take them to the locker room, they can say we are the ones who had a hand in replacing and renovating these locker rooms.”
The athletic teams who will primarily use the locker rooms are the women’s soccer team, women’s volleyball team, cheer and STUNT team, women’s basketball and women’s wrestling. Pohlman acknowledged that several teams will still share locker rooms because they compete in different parts of the year but the improvements will enhance the student-athlete experience.
It marks yet another major renovation to Hiram’s athletic facilities, with the school having renovated the Steve Belichick Olympic Training Center this past winter.
“I am a firm believer in it and when I was doing softball, we did a lot of renovations in my first year to the softball field whether it was building shelves in the closets or putting in drainage,” Pohlman said. “We had our athletes help us because they become vested in the property. It is their sport, and they need to learn to take care of it and it is a good learning experience. We had a couple of players that maybe have never used certain power equipment, but we showed them how to use it.”
