SIERRA VISTA — When Tom Gramatikas opened the Cochise Health and Racquet Club in February of 1982, it sat on the periphery of Sierra Vista.

Twenty-five years later, Sierra Vista’s growth has landed CRC in the center of a commercial hub, and though membership has doubled in those years, the game the club was built around has diminished into a niche sport.

Five-hundred of the club’s 1,000 members in the early 1980s were active racquetball players. Today, membership hovers around 2,000 and just 150 or so still play the game at 4225 Avenida Cochise. About 425 attend daily.

“The sport is not as popular as it used to be,” Gramatikas said. “A lot of sports, the same thing happens. They become fashionable, then they fall off — yet the avid ones remain.”

Beth Leeder, left, and Karen Pina watch plasma screens while using the cardio machines in the “Women Only” workout room at Cochise Health and Racquet Club recently. (Mark Levy-Herald/Review)

In recent years, the club has taken down racquetball courts to make room for exercise rooms and converted others into multi-purpose rooms for basketball, handball and wallyball, a volleyball-inspired game.  Only four racquetball courts remain.  “We took out one at a time over the years,” said Lynne Palestro, whose 18 years on staff rates as the shortest tenure of any CRC trainer. “There’s less interest in racquetball and more in weight training.”

While Buena Health and Fitness — two years CRC’s elder — has a core membership of seniors and bodybuilders, and the new Summit Fitness caters to the young, upwardly-mobile, Cochise Racquet Club  tries to be all things to all types of people.

It boasts the largest weight room in town at 3,200 square feet. The cardio center upstairs features five elliptical machines, seven treadmills and seven stationary bicycles, all positioned in front of several plasma-screen TVs. Also upstairs is a 12-unit Life Fitness Circuit, recommended by many physical therapists. These machines, which sit in the space once filled by old Nautilus machines that the club donated to Buena High School, measure a person’s strength and calculate a percentage of resistence corresponding to the number of reps.

There is a separate workout room just outside the women’s locker room, reserved for women who may feel self-conscious in the general workout area or may simply want more privacy. This room also has plasma-screen TVs.

Each locker room is equipped with its own spa, steam room and dry sauna. Outside, there is a 25-meter, three-lane pool and another Jacuzzi. Unheated, the pool is only open from May to October.

Apart from year-round swimming, there aren’t many amenities a gym-goer couldn’t find at CRC.

Of course, this all makes the racquet club the most expensive large gym in town. On average, a CRC member pays $4 a month more than they would at Summit and $14 more than Buena Fitness for basic membership.

Still, CRC is at nearly 80 percent of its capacity, though Gramatikas said with transient traffic and inactive members, there’s plenty of room for more.

“We probably could tolerate another 500 active members,” Gramatikas said. “With the depletion of membership and the rotation of (military) people, we lose 20 to 25 percent a year… we’re constantly looking for new members.”