YMCA to launch $350K improvement project

The Feith Family Ozaukee YMCA in Saukville, which this year is celebrating 10 years with the Kettle Moraine YMCA in West Bend, is getting a facelift.

The facility’s wellness and free weight center will close at the end of March and work will begin to create a new and updated center that reflects the needs of the Y’s members, Branch Director Matt McCann said Tuesday.

“We’re very excited,” McCann said. “We’re really looking forward to it. We’ve been slowly telling people about it, and they’re excited too.”

Since the Kettle Moraine YMCA bought the Feith Family Y in 2014, he said, it has invested $2.5 million in repairs and upgrades, but most of that work was maintenance that wasn’t apparent to members.

“To be able to do a project members can see and use and enjoy is really exciting,” McCann said. “This is the next step for us to keep everything updated.”

The upgrades are rooted in a survey of members done by the YMCA in 2022 followed by a study last year conducted by the Scottish firm Track My Gym, which placed trackers on every piece of equipment in the Y to determine its use.

“I got more data than I knew existed,” McCann said. “A couple of the machines I thought were popular, it turns out, got little use.”

The YMCA put together a taskforce to go through the data and then created a plan for the upgrades, he said.

After a capital campaign brought in $300,000 of the $350,000 needed for the improvements, McCann said, the decision was made to move ahead even as the capital campaign continues to raise the remaining $50,000.

So at the end of March, the existing wellness and free weight center will close and renovations will begin.

Much of the existing equipment will be moved to other areas of the YMCA during the anticipated two-month construction period, McCann said.

“During construction, I’m going to have as many pieces of equipment open as I can,” he said, noting some will be placed in the exercise studio and others in another studio at the Y.

The upgrades, McCann said, will reflect some of the trends in fitness today, in particular the emphasis on strength training.

“We do not have enough strength equipment to meet the needs of our members,” he said.

The renovation will be done in the existing wellness and free weight area, McCann noted.

“We’re not knocking any walls down,” he said. “We’re going to lay out the space to make it as efficient as possible.”

And, he said, some of the equipment will be replaced with machines that can handle more than one function. For example, he said, a single machine will replace the current leg extension and leg curl machines.

The project includes everything from new flooring to all new equipment.

All the strength equipment will be replaced, including a rack system with squat racks and three platforms, a larger dumbbell  area, a strength circuit, cable crosses and a dedicated stretching area.

There will also be a beginner free weight area that the Y officials hope will be less intimidating for people who are new to strength training.

McCann noted that the number of pieces of equipment will change with the project.

“We’re not going to have the 15 treadmills we have now,” he said. “We’ll have 12. But if it’s November and people are coming to me and saying, ‘I’m always waiting for a treadmill,’ we’ll adjust. There’s always room for improvement.”

While the work will require some adjustment during construction, McCann said, the end result will be worth it.

“It’s not fun while it’s going on, but when you’re back up you forget about everything that happened,” he said.

This is the second major project the Feith Family Y has undertaken in recent times. The first was renovations to the locker rooms, a project done last year and funded by area businesswoman and philanthropist Shirli Flack.

Y officials noted that the men’s and women’s locker rooms will be closed for a few days next month as work is done to clean and re-grout the floor tile.