RPACked: Autumn semester frenzy on Ohio State’s largest recreational facility

Preston Shields
Thu, 25 Sep 2025 02:33:24 +0000
Arts & Life, Campus, Instagram Page, News, campus, facility, fitness, fitness plan, gym, health, jesse owens south, Marci Shumaker, north rec, Office of Student Life, ohio state, rec sports, recreational sports, Riley Feiner, RPAC, students, work out

The Recreation and Physical Activity Center, or RPAC, is located at 337 Annie and John Glenn Ave, next to Ohio Stadium. Credit: Samantha Harden | Former Arts and Life Editor

As students arrive on campus for the Autumn semester, mass migrations of new faces are flooding into one popular workout building, causing mass congestion in the Recreational and Physical Activities Center on campus.?

The RPAC is the central workout building on Ohio State’s campus and was fully completed in 2007 to be available to the student body and faculty to use for fitness needs. It is one of the largest student fitness? centers in the United States, spanning over 600,000 square feet according to Sauer Group LLC, a main contributor to the construction in and around campus.?

One might imagine that in a space so large, congestion would be the least of the worries for the structure.?

This assumption is quickly proven wrong at the outset of every semester.

In the first week of classes, the RPAC averaged a whopping 7,000 people a day to converge in and out of the workout hub and 70,372 swipes to obtain entry into all of the workout areas on campus, with many of them coming from the centralized location, said Marci Shumaker, senior associate director of recreational sports in the Office of Student Life.??

Shumaker said this is a good problem.?

“You are more likely to have first-year success if you make two to three friends off the bat, and this is a place where that can happen,” Shumaker said.

Still, not everyone is happy about the influx of people, with users online voicing their frustrations of not being able to use gym equipment or being on a waiting list to use a machine. This is not an uncommon trend and has been a trying issue in years past.

Riley Feiner, a second-year graduate student in kinesiology and RPAC employee, spoke on the congestion.

“There are times that I occasionally get overstimulated while either working in or working out in the RPAC … this is typically due to the many noises in the facility,” Feiner said. “Weights dropping, equipment clanking, members chatting, our gates beeping and radios going off all contribute to this.”

Feiner said this sheer volume of people, noises and movement can be overwhelming, but the facilities do a good job of managing these factors outside of peak hours with the help of tactful planning.?

The planning of purposeful workouts will help the students of Ohio State better plan out their fitness journey and avoid peak hour troubles, Feiner said. Students are able to check the facility’s capacity on the Ohio State Recreational Sports website.?

Feiner said one possible solution is “working in” on sets.

“One thing members could try is to ‘work in’ with others using the same piece of equipment or doing the same lift,” Feiner said. “This allows two people to complete the same exercise during the same time it would normally take one person.”?

Ohio State offers four other main workout facilities aside from the RPAC, allowing students to tailor their workouts to the location that best suits their needs, according to the Ohio State Rec Sports website. This also allows for the planning of workouts to be exactly what the individual needs.

“All of our locations are different, and some may be more tailored to a group than the RPAC allows,” Shumaker said.

Shumaker said the Jesse Owens South Workout facility specifically is perfect for those who are interested in a weight training regimen and do not want to incur the wait times of the RPAC.

“You might be able to walk to [JOS] and do your sets in the time it takes you to find a bench in the RPAC,” Shumaker said.?

The other three facilities — the Jesse Owens North Recreation Center, Adventure Recreation Center and the North Recreation — all operate for fewer hours than the RPAC, but offer specialized facilities for activities such as outdoor basketball courts and rock-climbing walls.?

Whether you are a first-year student finding your footing on campus or a graduate student, the RPAC remains a hub of fitness, chaos, and energy.??