St. Helena High is at it again on the home improvement front, with a couple of significant facility upgrades.

The weight room and the gym are the latest to get facelifts, after the softball and baseball diamonds at the high school facility as well as Carpy Field underwent makeovers in recent years.

Here’s a closer look:

• Weight room

Most people associate weight rooms with the football program.

Third-year St. Helena football head coach Ian MacMillan, however, approached the Saints Athletic Association with the idea of improving the weight room to benefit all sports.

As of now, there are only a total of eight pieces of equipment remaining while the rest is new. The older stuff was either donated to Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School or thrown away.

MacMillan’s football players have been avidly working out throughout the offseason and into the summer. The volleyball and wrestling teams have also been enjoying the benefits of an improved facility.

“The way we tried to describe this through SAA is that we had a good weight room but it didn’t help our student athletes for their sports,” MacMillan said earlier this week. “We had a good weight room but we needed to make things more sports specific that everyone could do to make their athletes perform better.”

MacMillan jokingly added that some of the remaining equipment had been there when current assistant coach Matt Sowersby, who graduated in 1990, was still a student-athlete.

The weight room has three new benches as well as a new dumbbell rack to enable for better organization. There are also four new platforms with the Saints logo to help athletes with hand cleans and various other weight-lifting exercises.

There are also four new power racks, a new lat-pulldown machine, medicine balls, plyometric balls, a hip runner, a jammer and new back extension machines.

“We approached it to help all of our student athletes to keep them safer and to build love and joy of this being yours,” MacMillan said.

“SAA was also great to help out because we have a big freshman group this year. They gave money for shoulder pads and helmets for the freshmen because we need smaller sizes for them.”

MacMillan added that St. Helena volleyball coach Benny Rabanal also attended the meeting. In addition, MacMillan said that strength and conditioning coach David Pauls as well as assistant coach Kirt Brower have also helped the athletes improve themselves physically.

“The idea that it’s open space and that kids aren’t fighting to use the same thing allows us to do a lot of stuff, especially during the season when we go through cycles quickly,” MacMillan said. “That way we’re in and out in about a half hour. It’s great for the kids. They want to be in here more. They want to take pride in it because it would be hard to find another weight room in the valley that looks this good.”

MacMillan’s football program also got some new equipment for its program including a new blocking sled, video camera for the end zone and pressbox as well as a football computer program.

• St. Helena High gym

The volleyball, wrestling and boys and girls basketball teams will be able to enjoy the benefits of a better home venue. The gym had new bleachers and a new scoreboard installed before the 2000-2001 school year.

St. Helena athletic director Tom Hoppe, who is also the boys basketball coach, added that the gym is on track to be completed when the 2006-2007 school year begins.

The gym floor will be entirely brand new. Besides the floor being new, there is also a new vinyl barrier below the wood to prevent moisture from coming through the concrete.

There are also new shocks, springs, rubber and plywood on top of the vinyl. The entire gym has been sanded and sealed. The only remaining task as of presstime was returning the bleachers back in place.

The fact that the gym needed work should not come as a surprise, as it opened in 1969.

“We had some real bad water spots,” Hoppe said. “Last summer it got really bad. We had to re-sand a 12 by 12-foot square on part of the (southwest corner of the) court. It was starting to separate and ripple again. With Dr. (Robert) Haley’s help and Allan Gordon’s help, it got things moving.”

Gordon is the Superintendent of St. Helena Unified School District while Haley is the Director of Curriculum & Instruction.

The gym reconstruction has also made the various basketball teams look other directions in terms of getting in summer workouts.

“We’ve had to go to RLS,” Hoppe said.

“Before, kids would go to football workouts and then to basketball. They would leave one field across campus and go to basketball. Now, they have to go across town. We’ve lost a few kids on some nights because of it with the JV kids not driving. It’s curtailed what we’ve done this summer but that’s the breaks.”