By Lee Owen P ’24

Before Mercersburg built the Hale Field House in 2017, Storm athletes practiced almost exclusively outdoors to prepare for indoor track & field. Locate Mercersburg on a map, and one quickly grasps the potential challenges of outdoor Pennsylvania workouts in December, January, and February (or potentially any other month, during inclement weather).

Since the building’s completion, not only do Mercersburg indoor track & field athletes and coaches have a state-of-the-art facility to call home (ensuring consistent and ideal training conditions, along with the ability to host meets on campus—resulting in significant travel reductions and a home-field advantage for competitions), but every other Mercersburg athletic team and the entire school community can utilize the building for everything from offseason workouts (or in-season practices or competitions) and recreational use of the facility’s six-lane indoor track to open houses, school meetings, and other events.

And over the past several months, the Hale Field House has filled another crucial role by serving as the school’s temporary dining hall while major renovations are completed to Ford Hall (which was originally constructed in 1965). The sparkling new dining hall opened on February 3, 2026; and the field house’s 200-meter competition track, infield for field events and tennis or basketball courts, and space for lacrosse, baseball, softball, and golf training will now come fully back online.

Having a full-service dining facility which can serve more than 500 students, employees, and families at a time placed (quite literally) on top of such an important athletic facility is a logistical challenge, to say the least. But Mercersburg is a resourceful and creative place, and, according to head indoor track & field coach Betsy Cunningham P ’22, ’24, that outside-the-box thinking has proved valuable since the start of the dining center renovations in summer 2025.

“I’m grateful to our coaches for their flexibility and creativity as we design new workouts that utilize the features we need for hard workouts,” says Cunningham, who first arrived at Mercersburg in 2001 and has been the school’s head girls cross country coach since 2005; this is her third season as head indoor track & field coach. “We are able [in the current field house configuration] to run four hurdles and have a high jump set up in one of the basketball courts. We’ve also done hard workouts around the quad and used the chapel hill for workouts.”

Cunningham’s predecessor as head coach, David Grady P ’16, ’22, ’25, ’28, is extremely familiar with adapting workouts to fit available spaces both indoors and outdoors. Grady has served on the faculty since 1994 and was the indoor team’s first head coach (a role he held for nearly two decades); for the first dozen years of his indoor coaching tenure, he was charged with running an indoor program sans any official indoor workout or competition space.

“We would block off part of a hallway in the Nolde Gymnasium complex where athletes could run several hurdles, and set up high-jump mats inside the fitness center or gym,” Grady says. “We’d have our long jumpers do pop-ups into the mats to practice landing technique. We’d throw the shot put off the back porch near the issue room; this was before the Lloyd Aquatic Center was built, so there was a hill across the driveway you could throw into. The athletes would do a few throws, then come inside to get warm again, and go back out for a few more throws.

“When weather permitted, we also used portions of the outdoor track. The end near the scoreboard gets a lot of shade and it’s icy for much of the winter, so we might have had 200 or 300 meters of track to use. This worked pretty well for the sprinters. We practiced long- and triple-jump approaches on the track, along with pole vault approaches while carrying the pole. We also had several routes where we would run stairs in the gymnasium complex, and even went over to Keil Hall to run the stairs on occasion. Often, we would run up the center stairs in the gym and incorporate a fast lap on the old suspended track above the fitness center. We were creative—because we had to be—and the athletes were wonderful about being adventurous and flexible.”

Similar buy-in has been required from athletes, coaches, and community members this year while the field house (and the temporary kitchens erected in partnership with FLIK Independent School Dining) provides sustenance for everyone on campus.

“I really give a lot of credit to our coaches; they’ve been good about finding ways to take advantage of spaces we have available this year,” says Director of Athletics Lauren Jacobs, who spent eight years as Mercersburg’s head softball coach. “We’ve been utilizing the turf on Regents’ Field, with its new lights. A lot of teams have been using the pool even more. In a weird way, I think it has actually benefited our athletes because all this has focused them more on becoming true all-around athletes, and not just on being throwers or runners or individual sport players or whatever.”

One unavoidable impact in not having the field house fully available for competition during the 2025-2026 indoor track & field season is a significant increase in travel for meets. In a “normal” year, Mercersburg typically hosts several events that draw up to 600 athletes from across the region, which serve as quality exposure (and also a source of revenue for) the school. The ability to host makes scheduling and logistics much more convenient for athletes, coaches, and others involved with the program.

“When we are able to host meets, we have people from all over the region who are almost begging to come here and compete,” Jacobs explains. For many schools in the Mid-Atlantic, the Hale Field House is the closest high-quality competition venue, reducing travel time for schools competing at Mercersburg-hosted events.

Grady also points out a highly successful Mercersburg scheduling initiative to host competitions on Friday afternoons and evenings during the season. “This has been really popular with our athletes along with those at other schools, since [competing on a Friday] can open up the weekend a bit more for the students,” he says. “What a difference walking down to the field house after classes on a Friday can be, rather than getting on a bus for a couple of hours early on a Saturday morning.”

In less than a decade of existence, the Hale Field House has hosted multiple Mid-Atlantic Prep League and Pennsylvania Independent Schools Athletic Association state championship meets. (Mercersburg is one of just two MAPL schools with fully competition-level field houses.) The venue was the regular host of the PAISAA Championships until last season, when it moved to Philadelphia and a new state-of-the-art facility at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2017, Mercersburg indoor track & field athletes have set 44 new school records in different events, which demonstrates that quality facilities and a strong commitment on the part of the school and athletic leadership can produce genuine results.
 

Lee Owen P ’24 worked in Mercersburg’s Office of Strategic Marketing and Communications from 2006 to 2022, spending 15 years on the faculty and more than a decade as editor of Mercersburg magazine. He has also worked at Rutgers University-Camden, High Point University, and Guilford College. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.