So, Jake Swartwood, the dean of students and athletic coordinator at RCMS, and the school’s physical education coach, Miles Huff, wanted to upgrade the makeshift weight room at the middle school.

And they got the help they needed from community members, nonprofits and Payson Premier Dental.

“Our office has a heart for the middle school,” said Payson Premier Dental Marketing Coordinator Sarah Hubbard. “Dr. (Kristin) Wade’s husband, Gail Wade, teaches there and my husband helped coach football there and both my kids went there.

“All of us have had kids go through the middle school and the one thing that we noticed is that they always get the hand-me-downs from the high school which, especially with sports equipment, doesn’t really work out very well because it’s not for middle schoolers.”

Payson Premier Dental teamed with nonprofits MHA Foundation, Mogollon Sporting Association, as well as Payson Golf Club, to generate most of the $22,000 needed to build a new fitness center at the middle school. The groups raised $17,000 of the funds, with the other $5,000 coming from RCMS.

The golf club hosted a golf tournament to raise money for the project last October and also donated money.

“The community came together, and it was amazing,” Hubbard said.

“We were kind of piecing together stuff that we had at the middle school and then some stuff that the high school was getting rid of to kind of just create our own mini fitness center/weight room,” Swartwood said.

“We ended up building those kids a pretty state-of-the-art fitness center that has all new equipment and it’s beautiful,” Swartwood said. “We’ll keep adding stuff to it each year and go from there.”

The new fitness center features eight stations that include such items as rack systems, free weights, dumbbell sets, pull-up bars, smash balls and medicine balls.

Swartwood said a big part of the reason for wanting a new fitness center is to not only help students get or stay physically fit and healthy, but to help them get started preparing to excel in high school.

“The overall goal of it is to start developing our middle school athletes prior to the point that they get in high school,” he said. “They can’t lift weights exactly like they do in high school. The body isn’t ready to take on a lot of that challenge, yet. But some kids, as they get older, the eighth graders, can get towards that. The overall goal is just to create overall good health and athletes or students that are just physically fit and enjoying it.

“Our eighth graders and our seventh graders, they’ll go to the football games and during the summer they’ll go to those Lil’ Longhorn Camps and a lot of those things. They always take them into the weight room and show them that. So, this is just kind of a way to give them something that is similar to that they can continue to develop their bodies and be a little more ready when they get to high school.

“We hope to send kids up to the high school that are ready to make quicker progress in the sports programs. That’s going to be a huge benefit, I think.”

He said the new fitness center is allowing Huff and RCMS to offer an advanced PE class starting this school year.

“I think we have like 45 kids in it,” Swartwood said. “But we’re looking to grow that program. And we have another one that is more like an intermediate course that’ll be like an intro to physical training or physical fitness.

“Then PE can take more of a focus like of game play and intro to the sports and all that stuff.”