PETOSKEY- Petoskey High School has a new weight room with turf, monkey bars, and almost double the space of its old weight room. The weight room is still a work in progress, but most of it is complete.
The school’s athletic director, Joel Dohm, says that the weight room is now competitive many of the larger schools, “This is all kind of designed based on what we’ve seen throughout the state to. Compete with the bigger schools. the turf allows us to do some sprinting in here. Allows us to do a lot of stretching. A lot of our footwork drills, the monkey bars above us are a great addition. They allow us to do a lot of upper body stuff.”
He added that the weight room is a classroom, “So moving next forward to this coming school year, it’s, there’s actually gonna be seven classes that will utilize this Classroom throughout the day. So, it’s every hour there’ll be 35 to 40 kids in this classroom, every hour working and getting stronger. And learning life skills too. That’s our big thing too, is learn those life skills that are gonna make us healthier throughout our lives.”
One Petoskey student, Nick Gietzen, said that the weight room is really something special. “First time I seen this place like shed a tear. It was, it’s just amazing. I love the monkey bars. It’s probably one of my favorite things. I love all the racks and all. It’s like so easy to get the weights now. Everything’s in a specific order. Thanks to Coach Manor by the way.
Levi Manor, the head of strength and conditioning at Petoskey High School, keeps everything in perspective. “I mean this is almost like a college. I mean, it’s not even almost, I would say, the facility here competes with a lot of your college facilities. So, we have 12 total rack stations that we can use, we got two sets of dumbbells, on each side of the weight room. We have eight trap bars. We have a few different platform stations. I mean, really, we have enough that we can efficiently work with probably around 40, 50 athletes at a time in here.
Manor is excited to get all the students back and working in the new weight room.
“So we got back in here, after this was all completed around March, late March, early April. So I mean, we really only spent about two months or so in here, for the remainder of the school year. So, I’ve had about that much time this summer now, being in here. But yeah, it’s been pretty awesome and definitely we’re excited and love having it. It’s been amazing
