If you can safely make it over to the Rec Center this evening, there’s a Public Imput Session on the Master Plan at 7p.  From Dan Magee…

City Residents: You are invited to the next public input session for the Decatur Recreation Center master plan on Monday, April 13, at 7 p.m. at the Recreation Center, 231 Sycamore Street. The City of Decatur is developing a master plan to direct future improvements to the city’s 50 year old recreation center. The first session was held on Tuesday, Dec. 9th and focused on a review of the existing facility, an overview of recreation/community center facilities in similar communities, and invited public discussion around a series of questions to identify program needs and priorities for the building.

Decatur’s Active Living division needs your help in planning how the building can be modernized to serve future community needs. After mid-2009, the Center will no longer be used for high school athletics. This offers an opportunity to consider its future use, especially the 10,000-square-foot gym. LP3 Architects have used information gathered at the December public meeting, from user surveys and from discussions with patrons to develop a preliminary plan for improvements to “the Rec.”

As the DHS basketball teams gear up to play their last game at the Rec tonight (girl’s game starts at 5p), principal Lauri McKain-Fernandez sends along this recent interview with Decatur’s legendary basketball coach Bob Reinhart, where he talks about his career in Decatur, great games at the Rec, and his anticipation for the new, on-campus facility.

Article and interview by sports writer Billy Banks…

When we moved to Atlanta in 1981 there was one word we heard more than any other, a word uttered on nearly a daily basis — “Sherman.” As in “Sherman burned this,” or “Sherman left us nothing but a dang chimney,” or “we had to bury the silverware so that rascal Sherman wouldn’t take it” and so forth. It was simply amazing to us, raised as we were in a distant border state, how many people talked about W.T. Sherman some 120 years after he left Georgia. When we moved to Decatur in 1987 we had a similar experience, and still do, every time we attend a game at the Legendary Decatur Rec Center. There’s hardly a game where someone doesn’t mention the name “Reinhart,” as in “this is the way we did things back in Reinhart’s day” (although no one’s ever claimed that Reinhart took their silverware). Read the rest of this entry »