Something that is sure to change the experience of athletes, is the recent opening of the new kinesiology lab and aquatics center, where Long Beach City College hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony on Friday at the LAC campus.
“I’m very excited about this great new addition to our campus and the many advantages it will provide our students while honoring our past like legendary Monte Nitzkowski,” Athletics director Randy Totorp said.
This new facility was named after late water polo coach Monte Nitzkowski, who died in 2016.
Nitzkowski coached LBCC to six state championships in water polo, between the years 1954 and 1989.
Totorp explained that this new building is “a tribute to the past as much as it is a commitment to the future”
Jeff Wheeler, a member of LBCC’s masters swim team and a current professor in the English department says that “LBCC has always had a great pool, a great aquatics program but this is a huge deal.”
“I know what it was like to go into our team space, and I gotta tell you that as an aspiring 18-year-old, it wasn’t amazing back then,” Totorp said. As for him and other former LBCC athletes who now serve the school as faculty like Totorp and Uduak-Joe Ntuk recall their time at LBCC as a student
This new pool features a 50×25 meter Olympic-sized swimming pool with an adjustable wall to accommodate both Olympic and college competitions.
Current swimmers like Mazen Abouelela reiterate how much of an improvement this is for current student-athletes, explaining “this will honestly help us so much”
One of the most noticeable differences for Abouelela is the new and improved swimming blocks, the ledge that swimmers dive into the pool from at the start of a race.
“That was something we always had to deal with before, those old blocks were tiny, you could barely fit both feet on them so these new blocks mean a lot to us,” said Abouelela.
Abouelela also touches on how the water polo teams and swim teams used to coordinate so that practices didn’t overlap; with this pool, both teams are able to practice simultaneously.
“I believe this new complex is the premier athletic facility in the region. I can tell you this rivals anything you would see at a 4-year university,” superintendent-president Mike Munoz said, during his speech.
Ntuk sees the facility as “an opportunity for us to engage with our entire campus community.”
Looking to the future, Ntuk says “when the world cup comes, this is somewhere that those athletes from around the world can come and practice and be ready for a competition.”