Marble Falls Middle School weight room to get new racks, benches

CAPTION: The Marble Falls Middle School weight room is getting new equipment and flooring after the school district’s board of trustees approved purchasing new racks and benches. Graphic courtesy of Marble Falls Independent School District

Marble Falls Middle School student-athletes will soon have new equipment and flooring in their weight room.

That’s because the Marble Falls Independent School District’s Board of Trustees approved purchasing 10 heavy duty racks with adjustable weight storage and 20 dumbbell benches. Total cost is $71,276 after the $34,124 discount.

“We’re going to be able to get new racks, new weights, new systems and kind of open up some space for us to be able to feel like we’re training the kids to be prepared for the high school,” athletic director Keri Timmerman said.

“The concepts were designed by Power Lift specifically for our student-athletes,” Assistant Superintendent Stan Whittle told board members during their regular meeting April 19. “And what I think you’re going to see is just high-quality training equipment in the middle school athletic weight room. … We worked with (the) Power Lift vendor on this. Coach Timmerman has been in constant contact with them as we look also at future projects.”

Whittle noted the eight-foot racks “serve as the centerpiece(s) of the weight room” because of the many ways they’ll be used. Each side has bars for plate storage and resistance bands “for versatile training.” Top bars have barbells and a pull-up bar. The posts are adjustable.

“They are double-sided so you can have two benches within one rack,” Whittle said.

Padded benches are adjustable and allow a variety of lifts, said Superintendent Dr. Jeff Gasaway. Each bench has leg press attachments.

Throughout the racks and benches are the school district’s running mustang in purple or gold with “Mustangs” in gold lettering. Purple, gold and gray make up the color scheme of the racks and benches.

“It serves as a motivator for athletes as they come into the weight room,” Whittle said. “This project represents more than just new equipment; it’s an investment in our student athletes, our athletic culture and the future of Marble Falls Middle School athletics. I feel like it combines functionality, safety, organization with the Mustang branding that will create a space our students can take pride in every day as they work to get better. We believe this weight room will not only improve training but also strengthen our school spirit and athletic development (for) long-term program success.”

To Gasaway, this project illustrated conversations he had with board members.

“The board in visiting with me, we talked about just wanting to really look at our middle school and taking a big step forward in athletics,” he said.

Whittle and Timmerman said the current equipment at the middle school was “very, very dated.”

Timmerman said improving the middle school weight room was on his to-do list shortly after he began work in January 2024 , adding that it was project that was close to getting funded two years ago. But addressing damage to other facilities from the hail storm in 2024 took priority. And now that voters approved facility improvements throughout the school district by saying yes to the May 2025 bond, officials wanted to look at the middle school weight room again.

“When you start talking about student safety and some other things, we’re just making sure that we’re giving them the best product possible,” the athletic director said. “We passed the bond and we knew that there would be an opportunity to do this eventually and Dr. Gasaway just created some pathways for us to be able to access that now, giving the middle school boys and girls athletics an opportunity to learn to lift the way that we do at the high school and make it a quicker transition for them and then be able to give them tools that are a little bit adequate.”

New flooring had been previously approved, the officials said.

“That’s been one of the biggest issues,” Timmerman said. “We had concrete in the middle school weight room, and so we were having to find a solution to that, because that’s not a safe surface to lift on the way that we lift and the way that we move. Any kind of wetness creates opportunities to slip and fall. We got flooring in there that was adequate for what we had to allow us to feel like we could lift safely and do the things we needed to do. But now we’re going to get basically a MONDO flooring in there.”

MONDO makes rubber surfaces designed for powerlifting and cross training.

Timmerman said as many as 450 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are in athletics or pre-athletics. Coaches aim for at least two lifting sessions per week, though the preference is three times and in the offseason, it could be more.

“Growing up, there was a lot of misconceptions about weights and strength and conditioning because people didn’t really understand it,” the athletic director said. “So there was a lot of ‘you don’t lift until you’re in high school because your growth plates aren’t fully formed’ and there was just a lot of misconceptions about what it actually does to your body and how it works. As we’ve quickly evolved into a society that is pushing the scientific basis of anything we do, people understood pretty quick that probably one of the best things you can do at any age is safely test and train your body. As much as we’re challenging our bodies in different ways with youth sports and the explosion of youth football and baseball and basketball and track, really, the biggest thing that they’re doing at that age is they’re just creating a safety net around their bodies being able to absorb force, being able to produce force, being able to create strong muscles and the aperture around their shoulders and their ankles so that you’re less likely to have damage when something does happen. I think we’ve learned more as coaches and parents understand more of what we’re trying to do. And they want it. They want kids to have the best advantages that by the time they get to high school, they understand the weight room.”