Wrestling team gets new training facility after 37 years in Rose Arena

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A map of the Rose Center is an unnecessary tool on a quest to find the practice room used by the Central Michigan wrestling team.

A functioning nose and a decent sense of smell and will lead you right to the training room.

After 37 years of use, the team is getting a new training room.

The new CMU Events Center features a new $300,000 practice facility for the team, which head coach Tom Borrelli and the rest of the team are grateful for.

“The new wrestling room will have better ventilation, natural lighting and a lot of things that will make it a better training environment,” Borrelli said.

The room the team is used to practicing in has been in use since 1973. It was once divided into two rooms, the practice room and a classroom, but had a wall taken down to give the team more space.

“You can feel the heat in here and you can feel the humidity,” Borrelli said. “It’s not the best training environment.”

The new facility will be bigger than the previous room, fitting three full mats instead of the two and a half mats the current room holds. There will also be space set a side for cardio equipment.

“Once in a while there are injuries with people falling into each other and we’d like to get rid of that,” Borelli said. “(The new room) will give us more space.”

The practice room’s location in comparison to where the matches will be held, inside McGuirk Arena, is one of Borrelli’s favorite part of the new training room. An enclosed hallway will connect the training room and competition floor.

“The nicest thing about the location is that we’re 50 feet away from the arena that we’re going to compete in,” he said. “Our guys can actually warm up in the wrestling room and then run out into the gym and compete. Not too many places have that.”

The team hosts its first home match at McGuirk Arena on Jan. 16 against in-state rival Michigan. CMU has won the last three meetings with the Wolverines.

“The fact that we get to warm up (in the practice room) and then walk out onto the mats, you can’t ask for anything better than that,” said redshirt freshman Craig Kelliher. “Last year we warmed up in a hallway, and you can only do so much on a cement floor.”

sports@cm-life.com