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KAMLOOPS SPORTS LEGACY FUND DONATION

WolfPack athletes are excited to reap the benefits of new training facility

Mar 15, 2023 | 4:28 PM

KAMLOOPS — It’s safe to say that Wednesday’s announcement of a $500,000 donation to the TRU WolfPack Athletics department caused quite a stir — especially for many of the student-athletes on campus.

“We’re all workout junkies, so we’re all really excited to have this state-of-the-art facility to be able to assist us in our goals of weightlifting,” Hadley Schmidt, Women’s Volleyball player explains. “We’re just really excited.”

While the Tournament Capital Centre is a great facility, this new space, which is located inside the TRU Gymnasium, will be a spot that the WolfPack athletes can call home.

“It’s nice to have something that’s the majority, just for athletes,” men’s basketball player Daniel Bost says. “We can come in whenever we want and work out together, like a nice team environment for us.”

WolfPack Strength and Conditioning coach Aaron Chew will be the man in charge of the new facility. He’s excited about the new space for a multitude of reasons.

“It gives us the most variety of tools and space to really fine-tune our training programs for the athletes — both on a team level and individual level to get bigger, stronger, faster and keep them out of the therapy room,” Chew explains. “Any championship team has that social connection as well, and we’re really looking forward to the space contributing to that culture of WolfPack athletics, as a whole.”

The WolfPack student-athletes are already looking forward to a time when they’ll be able to mingle with different teams and other athletes during training sessions.

“I’m already excited to spend quality time with other athletes from different sports teams I don’t really know,” Schmidt says. “The other girls, from like the soccer teams and the swimming teams, it’ll be really great to get to know them, and just build more relationships around the TRU Athletics program.”

Daniel Bost sees this as just another piece that will help draw more high-end athletes to TRU, as well as help keep some of that locally-grown talent at home.

“With this, and with the men’s soccer team coming off a national championship, there are little kids running around like, ‘I want to be a WolfPack athlete, I want to stay in Kamloops and go to TRU,’ instead of going elsewhere,” Bost says.