BURLINGAME, Calif. (KRON) — This giving season, Mercy High School in Burlingame is hoping for support from the community to help fund a new athletic center on campus.
The all-girls school has been around for 94 years but has never had a gym to call its own. According to the head of the school Natalie Brosnan, about 76% of the student body plays at least one sport. However, plenty of those teams, including basketball and volleyball, have to travel up to 20 miles to access appropriate facilities at other schools for practice and games.
“Without facilities on campus, we are at the mercy of other schools and their schedules, so sometimes our athletes aren’t practicing until 6:30 or 7 at night,” said Brosnan.
Currently, Mercy High is the only Catholic high school in the Archdioceses of San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Rosa and Oakland without a gym on campus. The Building the Dream fundraising campaign is looking to give the athletes home-court advantage in the near future.
“It’s been the dream of generations of young women at Mercy to have a home to call their own. It’s not just a gym, it’s a space our entire community can gather,” said Brosnan. “There’s opportunities for visual and performing arts programming, there’s so many more opportunities created simply by bringing this building to our facility.”
The total project cost is $27 million, which includes the gym, strength and conditioning room, sprint track, and student life space. Mercy High needs to raise the remaining $6 million by March 2025 to begin construction by the summer.
