NORTH VERNON — Construction of Jennings County High School’s new, roughly $5 million dollar wrestling facility is on schedule to open this winter.
The 24,000 square-foot gym will be able to hold around 1,000 people and has enough space to hold up to six wrestling mats while the bleachers are pulled out. It will have two locker rooms, a storage room, and a coach’s office.
The facility will be used for wrestling events for all grade levels and can be converted into volleyball and basketball courts as needed. The current indoor weight room was also expanded to fit the new addition to meet the needs of all the wrestlers.
“This facility has been a long time coming and our kids deserve a facility,” wrestling coach Howard Jones said. “Everyone else in the conference has a wrestling gym and we have never had one.”
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Jones said that having the facility will make scheduling practices easier for all teams at the high school.
“The new gym was built so we would have a facility large enough that we would not have to divide our team at practice,” Jones said. “The great thing is that we will not have to get out of the gym and end practice 30-40 minutes early before a basketball or volleyball game.”
The new facility will also allow the school to host larger competitions outside of postseason tournaments.
“We can finally host wrestling tournaments here because before we had the facility the tournaments would interfere with basketball,” Jones said. “From day one, 42 years ago, I had aspirations of there being a wrestling facility. It’s been in the plans for a long time but never planned to be this big.”
The groundbreaking ceremony was held on March 5 and the gym is due to be completed and turned over to the school by Dec. 14.
While COIVD-19 has slowed some projects, school officials say that the construction of the new gym was actually sped up since the school didn’t have students and teachers in it for an extended period of time.
