While Galileo faces many problems related to having a 100 year old building, the Van ness gym has been particularly troubling over the last few years. These issues include; some of the lights flickering, leaks, and the roof collapsing in the girls locker room.
According to volleyball and basketball coach, Coach Mark Huynh, the school first replaced the lights 8 years ago, but a year later the flickering began. Numerous lights have flickered continuously, similar to a strobe light, making it really difficult to concentrate during a game or practice.
The problem is that the new lights don’t match the old circuits that are in the building, the circuits will often overload when the bulbs try to draw out power, and the lights don’t get the power that it needs and then overtime they just start flickering. The district has recently replaced the flickering lights, but they don’t know if that will actually fix the problem, since this is the 2nd time this has happened already.
“The lights flashing has been an issue especially during game time, when they start flashing it affects us the referees and the opposing team so it kind of degrades it all, said” junior basketball player Mia F. While fellow teammate, junior Betsy D. added,“I don’t want to say that the constant flashing of the lights makes our school look bad but all other gyms that I’ve been to do not have these kinds of problems, a lot of people want our school to fix the lights.”
Prior to last week, the basketball team had to be creative in order to not have the lights flickering during the game. F/S boys basketball coach, Mr. Lee mentioned that the temporary fix they previously resorted to was turning the lights off during halftime, except for one row, for 10 minutes to allow the lights to cool off and stop the flickering for a limited time.
“Well it doesn’t happen too much but it kind of sucks because we’re expecting to go down there and play and that doesn’t happen which disappoints us. When the lights are flickering really bad we have to take a long water break. We play varsity practices on the side where the flickering is really bad and it affects a lot about your focus during practice,” said junior varsity player Mahlon C.
Another main issue with the gym which bothers both PE students & athletes is the closure of the girls locker room. Last year, the locker room ceiling collapsed for an unknown reason, and is still being fixed to this day. This has led to girls, specifically athletes, having to find various places to change for games or practice.
Many girls are frustrated at the situation. “Once the locker room collapsed I couldn’t even get my stuff back from my locker and no one told me about getting my stuff back,” said junior Ganna Y. Mia mentioned, “ We can’t change during practice or games in the locker room, so it’s frustrating having to change in the bathroom or in that small little storage closet.”
The final difficulty those using the gym face are leaks. With a wet rainy season the last 2 years, water seeps into the gym through the cracks around the windows whenever it rains especially hard. This sometimes creates a dangerous wet floor, or worse, small puddles on the gym floor. “When it rains a lot we can’t really practice ,for sure we can’t play the games,” said Coach Mark.
Update: The school is currently working on the girls locker room which will probably be fixed in the next 3 days and has fixed the lights last week. The leaks, on the other hand, are problematic with the whole building and therefore are still unattended to.
