Spencer Durose is an ASU Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to cover Valley Christian High School for AZPreps365.com. 

For Valley Christian High School, athletics is a big part of the school's history. With over 30 different athletic teams across 20 different sports, Valley Christian has racked up 76 Arizona state championships in the AIA since joining in 1989.

Any athletics program this decorated must keep its athletes at the top of their game and Valley Christian has recognized that with the recent installation of its new, top-of-the-line weight room.

The project started in the fall of 2019, with Valley Christian making early connections with companies. They ultimately landed on American Barbell, a premier designer, manufacturer, and supplier of commercial-grade strength and conditioning equipment based out of Las Vegas, Nevada. 

Jake Petersen, the school's assistant athletic director and head football coach, stated that the project cost just under $200,000. He came on board as the school's new head football coach for the 2020 season and got right to work on the weight room project. 

“Not just in football but sports in general, a weight room, if you’re doing it correctly, is the foundation of keeping kids healthy,” Petersen said. “We knew if we wanted to get to the top of where we wanted that the weight room was going to be a vital point.” 

Since the schools move to their current location in Chandler in 1996, Valley Christian has held a significantly smaller weight room up until the start of the project. Greg Haagsma, the school’s athletic director and head basketball coach, believes that this change has been a positive one for the programs. 

“The size, number one, has made a huge difference,” Haagsma said. “It’s also been a big difference in that the amount of kids willing and certainly motivated to lift to improve because of the quality and the newness of the instruments has increased.” 

Haagsma mentioned the difficulties that the school faced with COVID-19 and the ability to get the equipment. 

“What made this difficult was because the company that created all of this went from 100 employees down to 10 because Nevada only allowed them to have 10 workers in that building at a time so it took a lot longer than what we expected,” Haagsma said. “But again, the emphasis behind this was we needed more racks, we needed more equipment to be able to have a greater number of people lifting at the same time. Specifically football, we were running three or four shifts to get our whole team through and that was taking a lot of time.” 

While the school's project has certainly increased opportunities for its athletics programs and students alike, it has also helped a great deal with outside openings. 

Hayden Gage, a junior at Valley Christian who competes in powerlifting, has surely seen the benefits. Though the school doesn’t provide powerlifting as a sport, Gage has been able to use Valley Christian's new, state-of-the-art equipment to help him in his training. 

“We have multiple different types of equipment that we can use. The bars are brand new and the plates are brand new,” Gage said. “So it just feels good to be in a new weight room rather than an old one.”