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On Thursday, March 24, the Prescott High School weight room received the final pieces to its renovated lifting and speed training facility, which included painting the walls, new flooring, inlaid platforms, turf, racks and other miscellaneous equipment.

In approximately 72 hours, Prescott’s weight room went from one of the oldest, outdated facilities in the Middle Border Conference, to among the best in the area. Prescott Athletic Director Andrew Caudill stated that the renovations will be a ‘game-changer’ for the athletic programs.

The updated athletic equipment is the first phase of a three-pronged approach to completely revamping the function and aesthetic of the weightlifting facilities in the high school. The first phase included the aforementioned updates and totaled approximately $84,000 in cost.

Prescott football head coach Jordan Hansen was the driving force in fundraising and designing the weight room remodel. The project was funded through donations from various sources. The largest of which was Kwik Trip, which donated approximately half of the $84,000. Other local businesses including Ptacek’s, Cernohous Chevrolet, and each athletic team all made contributions to the project’s funding.

Of the $84,000 cost of the update, $35,000 was for the equipment, $35,000 for the turf, and the rest was spent on installation and miscellaneous costs associated with the project. While speaking about the benefits of the new facility, coach Hansen spoke about the challenges of the previous weight room equipment and why it was no longer viable for Prescott athletics.

“Coming here, there was just a lot of machines that we couldn’t use for programming,” Hansen said. “We had 20 or 25 kids in here and when you have seven machines of just one thing, you can’t put that in programming. Otherwise, kids will just stand in line and wait. We wanted to make it more function for athletes compared to the fitness center feel that it had before.”

The weight room not only helps with programming for high school kids in physical education classes but also dramatically impacts how high school student-athletes can train year-round. Coach Hansen spoke about how this will impact athletes moving forward.

“Hopefully, having a room like this we will get more buyin with our athletes,” Hansen said. “Some of the equipment too, we had our kids use some of the inverse curl machines over there. Our vendor was talking about how important that is for speed development. Every place that he’s sold them, they’ve purchased more. Injury prevention and speed development – it’s top of the line.”

In addition to speed and development, the indoor turf will also be critical for development moving forward. The new equipment will allow athletes to spend more time in the weight room instead of bouncing back and forth between there and the gym for different workouts.

“For our warm-ups and agility, we’ve got the turf, so we’re able to push sleds yearround,” Hansen said. “It’s nice. We can do our warm-up right here and then go to the racks and start the workout. We don’t have to go to the gym a lot anymore. We can do everything right here.”

The project had been in the works since late October and early November of 2021. The aforementioned Caudill spoke about how great it was to have Hansen take control of this project and shape it to Prescott’s specific athletic needs.

“It’s a game-changer for us,” Caudill said. “Hopefully it’s great for the kids who want to be in there. Coach Hansen did the fundraising work and he’s done a tremendous job with that. He’s our strength coach, a football coach and a physical education teacher. So, his vision is what we needed (for this project).”

Two of the biggest updates to the weight room include new racks that are called ‘dynamic racks’ meaning they essentially have all-in-one capabilities. They do more than a regular squat rack in a standard high school gym. Each dynamic rack costs approximately $10,000.

For the initial remodel, Prescott purchased two dynamic racks as part of that $84,000 figure. There are still four regular racks in the gym that both Caudill and Hansen would like to replace. Getting those replaced with dynamic racks is a process that they expect to happen throughout the next several years.

That process would include replacing one or two old racks with their dynamic counterpart each year until all of the old racks have been phased out of use. That could take 2-4 years, depending on how many are replaced each year. Caudill spoke about how he views the new weight room.

“(Jordan) Hansen would be able to answer this better than me, but I think that our weight room would be near the top of the conference,” Caudill said. “The space put us there, but we just had outdated equipment. It looked like a fitness center. That’s not what a strength and conditioning athletics facility looks like. Now we have stations and field turf – that’s a separator for us.”

In what was nearly an overnight transformation, Prescott completed revamped its athletic facilities which will allow both students and student-athletes to get bigger, faster and stronger more than ever before.

The two new ‘dynamic’ weight racks in the Prescott High School weight room. The racks provide more services than a standard weight rack and are Cardinal-themed. ________________ ________