Date Released: Wed, 5 December 2012 13:59 +0200

With almost half of the students’ population signing up for the health suite and a remarkable growth in staff and community membership, we could not have asked for a better year. 2010 will be remembered by our members as a year when we truly asserted ourselves as a reliable, growing and inspired facility. Their feedback throughout the year has been encouraging and we are grateful for their support. By signing up in numbers and committing to regular usage of the facility, they have not only kept us busy, but also challenged us never to take our foot off the accelerator of the continuous and incremental improvements that has defined the health suite year after year.

What drives us is our desire to continuously improve our services. We always aim to go beyond our previous limitations, to venture into new territories and to reach new heights and goals. We are passionate about our member’s experience, service excellence and creating a simple, uncluttered, supportive and user friendly fitness facility that not only cares about its client’s goals, but also nurtures the growth, learning and development of its staff, a workforce of over 60 students, who love what they do and proudly don our uniform with pride, turning it into one of the most recognizable on campus.

This was the year when we dazzled our members (including our world cup visitors who took out temporary membership), with new programs and initiatives. Highlights of the year includes, further improvements on the general look and feel of the facility, extended operating hours , staff exclusive hours, a vibrant Indoor Cycling marathon, which raised over R8000 for charity and of course the new state of the art Treadmills.

Our membership growth and the related increased usage of the facility, while good news, also exposed other realities, mainly the need for more space and even more importantly, the need for us to move closer to our members and their fitness goals. It is now our priority to ensure that our members are training right, safely and getting good guidance, more so given the projected future growth in student numbers and the fact that some may be new users of a gym facility.

Central to fitness and the way we work, is the element of fun. As a staff team, we truly had a memorable, fun and productive year. We kick started the year with an explosive team building initiative. Throughout the year we ran great events and took advantage of all team bonding opportunities. Our annual Section Heads staff development trip also proved a great success. This year saw us visiting Cape Town where we attended the 4^th Clinical Sports Medicine Conference and also managed to train in some of the country’s leading gym facilities and compare our facilities with those of other universities’. We closed the year differently and in style, a year end Star Awards Dinner which afforded us the opportunity to acknowledge outstanding achievements and to say “thank you” to everyone in our staff team.

As the sun sets on 2010, heralding the dawn of yet another brand new year, we are confident we are in good shape, ready to hit the ground running and to get everyone “moving” towards fitness and health.

“It is happening in the Health Suite and this is your invitation…!”

I would like to once again, thank the 2010 staff team and more specifically my hardworking Section Heads. Khozanai Mahembe, Lindsay Jackson, Shirley king and Jonathan Davy. What follows is a 2010 snapshot of their Sections