MONTGOMERY, WV (WOAY) – The City of Montgomery is looking to take over the Neal Baisi Athletic Center.
What once served as the athletic complex for West Virginia Tech and then became the YMCA after the campus moved may become the city’s community center.
Mayor Greg Ingram is working to strike a deal with West Virginia University to take it over to then update the facility where people can still have memberships and also provide a place to hold events, programs and leagues.
“We’ll have different programs. We’ve been talking to the karate instructor. We’ve had swimming instructors that want to come in and have swim meets, those type of things,” Ingram said. “There’s two basketball leagues that are interested in using the gym. There is softball teams that want to use the batting cages and certainly air rifles and archery was a big hit when it was there.”
The Upper Kanawha Valley YMCA closed permanently this past May, and since then, Ingram has been eager to get moving to make the building purposeful again.
With the arrival of cadets soon at the new Mountaineer Challenge Academy, he is hoping they will be able to use it as well.
He says they plan to know definitely by the first of the year whether or not the city will be able to officially take it over.
