Ping-pong? Nope. Usable pool-tables? Who needs those? Bowling Alleys? Ah, maybe if you find an open weekend to go visit the lanes in the next town over.
With the closure of Scot-Lanes, and having “The Alley” take up its former space, we now have more places for students to “gather”. You would think that the CoRE, the Lowry Pit, the residence hall lounges and living spaces, the common areas in academic buildings, the Wired Scot, as well as Mom’s would be enough to satisfy all the gathering needs of our student body, but the administration, along with a couple students had different opinions.
Not only do we not have a place to get in a game of pool, or a couple games in at the lanes anymore, but also we need to keep out of these spaces when a student organization has it reserved from 2:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. so that about three people can get together and talk about soda cans for about an hour or two within that time-frame.
Full disclosure, I never used Scot Lanes every week, or even every other week, but every now and then, it was great to get a game in with some good company on a Friday night after campus-security shuts down a harmless get together at 11:00 p.m. Now, however, we need to scurry back to our residence halls in order to get a game of pool in on one of the top-notch tables with about 50 percent of the carpet still intact and six balls with a cue and a half. Now, we have even more study areas, when we already had the libraries, the Pit, the academic buildings and not to mention, one’s own room; and one less place for students to maybe spend some time de-stressing. Are there arcade games? Sure. But when there’s one student at a table in a corner of the same room where you’re playing ski-ball and having arcade-game noises bother them, you are asking to be shushed. The study rooms in “The Alley,” are always occupied by one singular backpack for a large part of the day, and maybe an actual person for a couple minutes every now and then.
This rant has a focal point, believe it or not, which is that a college, while being an academic institution, needs to also allow for students to have outlets. Keeping in mind the fact that this is a small institution, a private institution, and I understand that funds are not the easiest input to come across — despite what the students think with how much tuition costs here, there is so much that could have been done with that space, which would have provided far more utility to the students; because what that space has become is essentially some sort of extension of a library with its study rooms, printers and unnecessarily large hallway.
Does the idea of dropping WOO91 sound all that surprising now? If that does go ahead, you can count on the fact that the facility used for the station will also eventually be converted into a study/gathering space, allowing even more students to reserve the space and talk about soda cans.
Yash Bajaj, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at YBajaj20@wooster.edu.