Facility Planning For Community Swimming Pools
If you are the facility manager or planner for a community center, one of your biggest money makers is likely your pool. In smaller towns especially, the community pool is often the biggest attraction during the summer. This is great for business and great for the town, but it can be a nightmare for managers.
One of the toughest aspects of community center management is facility planning, and that is even harder with a pool. In today’s SFA blog post, we’ll give some facility planning tips for your community pool as well as some ways to make your facility run more efficiently.
The Facility Planning Problem With Swimming Pools
While all community centers are unique, they are usually formed out of the same few elements: basketball courts, party rooms, fitness areas, and sometimes a cafe. This basic set provides those in charge of facility planning with versatility and flexibility. They have spaces that can be used for multiple functions.
That isn’t the case with a swimming pool. Swimming pools serve one function. When it comes to facility planning, it can be increasingly difficult to balance free swimming times and programs because they don’t go together well, especially at an outdoor pool.
How To Manage Programs And Rec Time
Facility planning is one of the bigger benefits of having an indoor pool because you now have several more months to plan programs than you did before. If you have an outdoor pool, you are forced with only a few months to accommodate a city full of swimmers. Cutting into that time with private sessions and programs can be difficult.
The best way to manage this problem is to identify your peak times as a facility and plan your programming around those times. If you see the highest volume of swimmers from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., you can schedule private sessions in the early morning or early evening.
Contact SFA For Your Swimming Pool Planning Needs
At the end of the day, most of the people utilizing your pool will be children and adolescents. If you have an outdoor pool, this is even more relevant. However, there is also business to be had in things like swimming lessons, private session, and birthday parties. Finding the time to carve out for events like this will come down to your facility planning capabilities and your effort as a staff.
At SFA, we believe that there is a way to design facilities and manage them that is both efficient and financially viable. We would like to help you design a facility of your own or help you manage one. For more information, give us a call at (727) 483-7910 or contact us online today.
