Molds and piled wastes stray students away from using the dressing room. Photo by Chung Yun-jo.
As students walk in, the sight of mold and abandoned fans immediately catches their attention. After looking around for a place to store their belongings and change their clothes, they end up going elsewhere.
These poor facilities are the Ewha Tennis Court’s dressing rooms consisting of simple container boxes situated at the side of the court, and they are falling short of students’ expectations.
Every semester, over a hundred students use the Ewha Tennis Court either for class, club activities or personal exercise; this fall semester, 125 students are taking tennis courses. Yet the makeshift dressing rooms located beside the tennis court are in such poor condition that they make their use very difficult.
Students feel uncomfortable in the unorganized dressing room. Mold on the walls and rusty lockers that students do not dare to open leave students without a place to rest or change their clothes freely.
Although students are supposed to take their shoes off before entering the dressing room, the floor covering unchanged since 1998 discourages students from doing so. The shower booth inside the dressing room is also seldom used by students due to its dilapidated appearance.
“I didn’t want to use the dressing room because it seemed unhygienic,” Na Il-yang (Chinese, 3) said. “The dressing room looked more like a warehouse for storing abandoned furniture. I didn’t know it was a dressing room until the end of the semester because it seemed so crude.”
The tennis court janitor has been unaware of students’ opinions.
“I try to clean the three tennis court dressing rooms every day,” said Hyun Kwon-pyung, the janitor in charge of the Ewha Tennis Court. “I didn’t know of students’ inconvenience since no one directly spoke to me about it.”
Beside the disorderly state, the dressing room is inconvenient for students in several ways.
Since there are no partitions to provide personal space for students to get changed, students must do so in an open area.
“Since there are no barriers for privacy when getting changed, we feel uncomfortable,” Lee Kyeong-ah (Industrial Design, 2) said. “Plus, there is no place where we can keep our belongings safe.”
Along with the Ewha Tennis Court, the dressing rooms for female students and male faculty were built in March 1998 by the College of Health Sciences. In response to the request for a dressing room to accommodate female faculty, another makeshift dressing room was installed beside the main dressing room in November 2005. Other than the installation of tennis court shades, which were finished in the spring 2013, the main dressing rooms remain neglected.
“Since the tennis court is quite far from the main buildings of Ewha, the school is largely unaware of student inconveniences,” said Chung Hee-jung, an official of the College of Health Sciences. “We will try our best to listen to students and find a way to reduce their discomfort.”
저작권자 © Ewha Voice 무단전재 및 재배포 금지