Every time you steal exercise equipment you make a hula hooper cry

As often as we can, Kathryn, Lam and I get together to hoop at school. For a while we were hooping outside in the Quad, and we've tried hooping in the basketball gym in the Student Activities Center, but our favorite place to go is the aerobics room in the USCA Wellness Center.  It has the perfect set-up- nice carpet, a sound system, regulated temperatures and mirrors. The mirrors are the best part. Whenever we hoop there I can feel myself get better- I never realized how useful they were to dancers until I had 360 degrees telling me how I can improve.

After hooping in a great environment like that our other options are somewhat disheartening. Hooping outside is great, but the weather has been really unpredictable lately. It got up to 80 degrees last week and today it only topped out at 65 (with a nice measure of rain thrown in). Our other option, the SAC basketball gym... well, it's set up as a basketball gym and when the guys are in there playing, there's no room for us. And the floor is dirty. And there's no mirrors. So the room in the wellness center is really where we try to go most often...

"Try" being the key word. For the last two weeks we've been prevented from using it by a new policy that the Wellness Center instated after some equipment got stolen- without an instructor we aren't permitted in the room.  It's been really upsetting. Both Kathryn and I have paid the fee to use the gym, and part of tuition goes to keeping the Wellness Center maintained. Despite that, we're being barred from utilizing all it has to offer, and quite frankly, it's the only part of the Wellness Center I'm interested in using- weight machines and tread mills weren't ever appealing (which is why I hoop instead). It's understandable that their policies would change after a theft, but even after talking to a supervisor about the possibility of a sign-in sheet or accountability system we were still prevented from using it.

After hooping out our frustrations (and some strong words) in front of the building, we went back and waited until the Director was available. After a brief chat about why we really really really want to use the room, we set up an appointment to really figure it out with her on Friday- she was a lot more understanding than the supervisor we originally talked to.

I think the whole thing was just confusing and upsetting to everyone because the guys at the counter were just doing their job to enforce this new policy, then these hula hoopers were getting upset that they couldn't use the room, and to top it all off, no one even knows anything about hooping here so it's hard to be taken seriously.

Hopefully everything will be solved and we can use the room in peace next semester (this was the last week of fall semester). And to whoever stole stuff and ruined it for us, that sucks. Don't steal things- you make hula hoopers sad.