New W.A. Foster Center to open Monday
By Melinda Harrell
Published in News on April 3, 2016 1:45 AM
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News-Argus/ALAN CAMPBELL
The basketball court at the new W.A. Foster Recreation Center at Mina Weil Park is college-sized, with dimensions of 94 feet by 50 feet.
The new W.A. Foster Center is the future for community recreation in Goldsboro.
The gym floors are unscuffed and newly painted in brilliant blue, green and orange that shine under the vaulted barrel roof. The roof itself an homage to the old center.
There is not a single sound of shuffling tennis shoes, laughter, chatter or bouncing basketballs and volleyballs.
But, as of Monday, that will all change, when if center officially opens its doors to the public.
With the opening of the new center, the old one -- rich in community history and housing, for many, a lifetime of memories -- will be left behind.
The old W.A. Foster Center was built in 1938 and eventually renamed to honor Walter A. Foster -- a revered educator and community leader throughout Wayne County.
A meeting asking for public input about what they wish to see happen to the 78-year-old building will be held at the W.A. Foster Center on Leslie Street from 5 to 7 p.m. on April 7.
Goldsboro Parks and Recreation director Scott Barnard said many people had already talked with him about the potential future use of the old facility, some even suggesting there isn't one.
"We have had a range of feedback," he said.
"There is one contingency of folks that are really not interested in preserving the building, but they want to see some sort of memorial-type thing, and I don't know whether that is a statue or gardens. There is another contingency of folks would be happy with turning it into a passive park, whether that just means basketball courts, playground that kind of thing."
Barnard said nonprofits have expressed interest in the use of the center.
"There are at least three different nonprofits that are interested in turning it into everything from a boxing facility with maybe some after-school programs," he said.
"Another group is talking about doing a feeding program with kind of a re-entry training that either have addiction issues or maybe a criminal history, an opportunity for those folks to get some sort of job training. I have had another group that wants to evaluate the space for a homeless shelter."
And though the old center will be closing its doors, the opening of the new center will offer a wide range of opportunities for growth.
Barnard said with the new center, the community will have a well of recreation and learning opportunities at their fingertips -- from more fitness classes to better equipment to better accommodations of all age groups.
"The challenge is we are open to adults during the day, and we make transitions during the day, and sometimes we transition back," Barnard said.
"We essentially kick the adults or the kids out. That is not how we want to operate and that is not how people want us to operate, but we don't have the ability to have the youth spaces and the adult spaces. So the biggest successes with the construction of this new facility is the youth game room. Essentially, we have an adult wing and youth wing and we have a dividable gym, so we can have youth on one side and adults on the other."
Barnard said the division of adults and youth have added to the ability to provide everyone in the community with recreation options during all of the hours that the center is open.
The youth game room will have pool tables, Ping-Pong tables and video games, and in the "adult wing" there is another game room with pool tables.
The new gym is regulation-sized and much larger than at the old center.
The divider that is suspended across the top of the gym rolls down to provide a separation of the court, which can accommodate different groups' games.
He said at the old center high schoolers, middle schooler and elementary students wait in shifts to play basketball, and the size of the old center's gym became a particular burden when school is on break.
Shockley said 10 to 15 students will wait, age group at a time, to play basketball.
"It's nice because elementary kids will have one side or there can be basketball on one side and volleyball on the other," Shockley said about the new facility.
The gym can also host tournaments and Shockley said a number of groups have been interested in renting out the facility to host them.
And if the game rooms and state-of-the art gym was not enough, the new center also offers an exercise room that will feature two treadmills, an elliptical, recumbent bike and a new, seated-style elliptical machine.
"I would like to be the one in charge of teaching everyone how to use the equipment," Shockley said.
"I have been a personal trainer for 10 years. It is all a matter of getting people used to it."
Fitness classes like zumba, urban ballroom, yoga and line dancing, will also be offered, and though the old center offers such instruction, the variety and volume will be increased once the new facility opens, said Barnard.
"Currently we offer those programs at the Herman Park Center, and as fill-in, we used W.A. Foster because we only had one gym space," Barnard said.
"So if we put a fitness program in W.A., that means we bumped league basketball, which was our daytime basketball league. Now, we are going to be able to split our fitness classes, so now that everything we are currently offering at the Herman Park Center as a necessity, we are going to be able to spend a lot of that time here. W.A. Foster is closer to a recreational center than anything we have. Herman Park Center is more of a community center, it doesn't really have athletic space. This will become ground-zero for all those fitness programs that we didn't have room for."