HARTFORD — For years, campus tours of Hartford’s Trinity College pretty much avoided the athletic center tucked into the southeast corner of campus, except to say the center is “down there” and varsity athletes spend a lot of time in the building.

Sure, there’s also a gym for basketball and volleyball, a pool, weight room and a fitness center for the entire student population.

“But it’s not remarkable enough that you would say, ‘Hey, come to Trinity, and let’s go look at this space that really speaks to our commitment to wellness,’ ” Drew Galbraith, Trinity’s director of athletics and chair of the physical education department, said.

A new $30.1 million addition to the George M. Ferris Athletic Center — the oldest part of the structure dating to the 1920s — aims to dramatically change the image of a brick, monolithic structure that is most famously known as the building with four back doors and a difficult to find front entrance.

Construction is expected to begin by the end of this year on a 37,000-square-foot addition with completion in mid-2025.

The addition will focus on creating a 2-story center that will highlight fitness and wellness, a priority that has been unfolding for more than a decade on college and university campuses across the country.

At Trinity, the addition’s first floor will include gathering areas for students, studios for yoga and spin cycling, a gymnasium equipped for basketball and volleyball, new squash courts and a fitness center with workout machines and weights.

A second floor, with athletic department offices and a conference room will open onto a terrace that looks out over athletic fields and, in the distance, Trinity’s iconic chapel.

Fitness centers projects such as Trinity’s are growing in importance as a recruitment tool in a competitive admissions landscape, not just for athletes but for all students, Galbraith said.

The population of college-age students is shrinking and is intensifying the stakes for attracting new students, Galbraith said.

“As student admissions change and there are fewer and fewer students going to a four-year college, you have to have all the amenities that students expect,” Galbraith said. “It has to be a place they want to be. And not just the prep schools and the private schools. We find a lot of students coming from public magnet schools who come here now and say, ‘Well, you know, in high school, I had X, Y and Z.’ ”

Galbraith said when he was in college in the 1990s, fitness was basically a weight room, some fitness machines and “just a lot more of go throw the ball around.” What students now expect from fitness has changed dramatically, especially over the last decade, Galbraith said.

“It’s also societally,” Galbraith said. “We’re spending more and more on fitness. Everybody wants to live longer. Everybody wants to live healthier. There’s a lot of great information out there about what health and wellness looks like. Not only for us in middle age, but for younger people as well.”

‘A reason to come and try’

Nationally, colleges and universities are taking a hard look at their fitness and wellness centers, and many are making big-ticket upgrades.

St. Louis-based HOK Group, Inc., an architectural firm which specializes in designing college fitness centers, said projects can range from modest additions costing $10 million to $15 million to entirely new structures that run well over $100 million.

This spring, the $113 million, 272,000-square-foot Bakke Recreation and Wellbeing Center opened on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Designed by HOK, the four-story structure includes a pool, athletic courts, spin cycling and yoga studios, a climbing wall, sports simulators, e-sports gaming room, an indoor jogging track, and rooftop fitness center. Those fitness offerings are combined with wellness services such as a teaching kitchen, nap pods, and rooms for massage therapy, meditation and peer wellness counseling.

“With these rec centers, the goal is to create an inclusive environment where all fitness ability levels feel comfortable and provide a variety of amenities that everyone has a reason to come and try something new that they are comfortable with,” Emily Ostertag, senior project interior designer at HOK, said, “but expand out into different items due to the variety of what’s available.”

Ostertag said another emphasis is on expanding the idea of inclusivity. HOK’s recent projects have included gender-neutral locker rooms and making spaces flexible, not only to evolve over time with changing approaches to fitness and wellness, but to better integrate students with physical disabilities, Ostertag said.

Macrina Abdouch, a project architect at HOK, said it is not unusual for campus tours to skirt aging athletic and recreation centers, but that changes with additions or a new building.

“A lot of students are involved in the fitness side and seeing how attending the school day-to-day outside of the classroom is good for creating an impression when you are so far from home,” Abdouch said.

Adapting to new future uses

Trinity’s fitness and wellness center represents one of the largest construction projects on the college’s 100-acre campus in 15 years.

The $30.1 million project ranks alongside the $32.9 million renovation and restoration of the historic “Long Walk” in 2008; the $25 million construction of student townhouses along Crescent Street that added 300 beds in 2012; and the $6.7 million, 11,000-square-foot Crescent Center for Arts and Neuroscience that opened in 2017.

“Small, land-locked urban campuses don’t often get the opportunity to make dramatic shifts,” Galbraith said. “And so what we do a very good job of is adapting to our circumstances.”

In a recent tour of Ferris, Galbraith stopped on the second floor overlooking a fitness center with treadmills, stationary bicycles and weight-training equipment.

“So, if you’ve been a trainee student over the past 30-ish years, you’ve been working out in what was the old Trowbridge Pool, a pool that was built in the 1920s,” Galbraith said, before a new pool was built in the early 1990s.

Galbraith said the reuse of the pool space — vestiges of the old pool’s wall tile are are still visible —  is a prime example of how Trinity has adapted to provide services to its students.

“But it’s really appropriate that we modernize and provide them with a space that they are proud of, that the institution is proud of,” Galbraith said. “And as we go forward, we have to be in a space that is flexible to adapt to future needs. I don’t think I would be confident in saying that I can anticipate what every need is going to be 15, 20, 30 years down the road.”

The space that will replace the old workout center will have clean, modern lines and look out onto the campus.

The addition — funded heavily by alumni —  will be built on a former softball field that is now a lawn. A 10,000-square-foot wing of Ferris also will be demolished.

Trinity’s nationally-known squash team will play on the new courts, and the expanded center will continue to be open to the community.

One of those community programs is Capitol Squash, a daily afterschool program that builds off the sport into academics, Galbraith said.

“There’s a squash component that they do on a daily basis, but there is also reading, math and mentoring,” Galbraith said. “So it’s effectively using squash as a vehicle to promote students pushing themselves towards whether that’s a magnet or private high school and then, ultimately, into college.”

The building also was designed with the surrounding neighborhood in mind, with an entrance facing Broad Street, Galbraith said.

“They are already in our space on a regular basis,” Galbraith said. “But this will make that far more convenient for those families and just accessible in a really robust way.”

Kenneth R. Gosselin can be reached at [email protected].