University of Calgary’s Campus Recreation facilities are the largest and most popular of their kind in Calgary. Unfortunately, their extensive usage can increase the opportunity to for certain individuals to violate the established guidelines.
Following a particular occurrence of harassment last spring when a woman was chided by another patron on her choice of dress, Campus Recreation began a campaign to increase awareness of their current guidelines. Kinesiology communications director Don McSwiney said the current regulations are enough to uphold the exercise facilities’ expected standards.
“Given the fact that the Fitness Centre is filled to capacity most parts of the day, I’m surprised by how few issues we have,” said McSwiney.
“I’m very comfortable doing my own thing,” said first-year international relations major Madeline Maes.
McSwiney said they would not be implementing any new rules.
“We’re not going to start holding cultural education workshops on what it means to live in Canada,” said McSwiney. “It’s not our place to dictate morality.”
He said that violations of the current code will be dealt with appropriately to ensure the comfort of all users.
“We do not want to see people behaving disrespectfully to other people. We’re not going to accept that, we’ve never accepted that,” said McSwiney. “If, for example, a guy is working out in a Speedo, we’ll deal with that, but it’s not up to you to dictate morality. Everyone needs to feel comfortable when working out, so we can’t have people coming in and accosting or bothering people.”
McSwiney states that the increased communication of the current guidelines via humorous informative slides on Fitness Centre TVs has shown positive results.
“Overall, awareness of the rules and regulations has increased. The Fitness Centre staff have put up some slides on the TVs on some of the most common complaints they get — spitting in the water fountains and excessive grunting to name a few. That’s the sort of thing that we’re trying to get across, basically just how adults behave in a modern society,” said McSwiney.
“I’ve never come across any issues of respect,” says first-year economics major Jason Rogers.
Campus Recreation also reminds students that fees for the recreation facilities are part of tuition and they can use the facilities simply by showing their ID card.