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MacKay gymnasium has recently become “home” to the Olivet Colleges women’s basketball team.
At the end of the 2017-18 season, the women’s basketball team started moving its way over to MacKay. According to Zach Ingles, women’s basketball coach, the team started to practice there last year and liked it because it was closer to the other facilities on campus and has less traffic than Cutler does.
This year the team will be using the MacKay gym for practices, scrimmages, and workouts, also causing the gym to be off limits to other students at different times throughout the season.
John Adams, sophomore and football player, said, “I use the gym to play basketball at different times of the day, I’m worried that I won’t be able to do that as often as I did before.” Adams also said that the football team does drills in MacKay gym for off season workouts and hopes that they don’t have to find somewhere else to do that.
According to Kelly Patmore, Shipherd Hall director and intramural sports coordinator, other activities that are usually held in MacKay are intramural sports, rallies, laser tag, haunted hallways, and pickup games of soccer and basketball. Haunted Hallways will be Tuesday Oct. 30 from 10-11:30 p.m. in MacKay gym this year.
The women’s basketball team has also inherited a new locker room with this
move, which has undergone renovations. According to Ingles since the team has
moved to MacKay, the locker room has been cleaned, repainted, and has some
new additions inside and out. On the door of the locker room is a key pad lock
that can only be accessed by people who know the four-digit pin. This code has
and only will be given to faculty and the team.
Ingles also said that they have added new stools, a flat screen television, and couches in the locker room. Leijla Masinovic, junior and current women’s basketball player, said, “At Cutler we had to share our locker room with the women’s volleyball team and didn’t have our own space; it’s nice to have a place we can call our own where we can hangout as a team.”
With all these changes there are still more to come, for instance new pads on the walls, new backboards, and Olivet College logos on the doors of the gym, according to Ingles.
While all these new changes are in place, Olivet College is still at work on the 2020 and Beyond Campaign. This campaign has involved construction all over campus, from the Gruen Engagement Center, the new archive building, and the new coffee lounge. One thing this campaign has also introduced is the Student and Collegiate Center. According to the Olivet College website, “The new Student and Collegiate Center will create an exciting, inclusive place for Olivet’s diverse student body – whose academic, residential, co-curricular and athletic paths might not otherwise cross – to intermingle.”
The website also said that the center will be constructed on the current site of MacKay Gymnasium and “will seamlessly connect to the Upton Recreation Center.” There is no set date for this new construction; however, there is a budget set for $11,000,000.
The season opens Saturday, Oct. 27 at home verus Lake Superior State at 7p.m. Non-confrence games continue through November. The women face Albion at Albion on Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 7:30 p.m. The first home confrence game is against Hope on Saturday, Dec. 1 at 3 p.m. The next Saturday, the Comets play Alma at 3 p.m. at home. Last season, the women were 7-18 and 3-13 in confrence.