For those legislators, city and state officials who think closing one pool doesn’t have much impact on families, consider what effect it’s having on one local swim organization.
The Seattle Synchronized Swim Team has used St. Edward State Park’s Carole Ann Wald Memorial Pool as its home base since 1984, when it was called Seattle Aqua Club, and is made up of 44 competitive swimmers and another six to 10 in its beginning Sea Star program. With the proposed closure of the pool Feb. 25, Seattle Synchro must disperse its membership of eight teams to five different area pools just to match the current pool space and practice time it currently uses at St. Edward. This poses a major inconvenience to members — some of whom will soon be traveling as far north as the edge of Bothell/Mill Creek and as far south as Renton — resulting in more commute time and a break in the team’s unity by swimming at different pools and not getting to see the separate team routines develop. It also poses a significant added financial burden to the families who are members of this nonprofit organization.
Why the cost increase? It costs more to rent half a pool than a whole pool, and no other pools in the area have whole-pool availability except on the weekends. Additionally, synchronized swimmers have more unique requirements for practice than traditional swim teams: In addition to lap-lane usage, they need deep pool depths of at least 9 feet in order to practice synchro figures and lifts in their routines.
What other snags will Seattle Synchro hit with teams swimming at five different pools? There are many: we lose the ability of the head coach to oversee all teams on a given night; we lose many club communication tools like our family folders and our bulletin board (also a marketing medium); we lose a common meeting area for parent membership and board meetings with the closure of St. Edward’s gym and the varied practice locations of each team on a daily basis; we lose a storage place and the ability to have one set of everything, including a sound system to listen to music under water, special mats for the athletes to stretch and do abdominal work on, etc. etc. Seattle Synchro’s daily life just got much more complicated.
Some members of Seattle Synchronized Swim Team will still work with other community groups to find alternative funding solutions in hopes to reopen St. Edward CAWM pool in the future, or possibly to keep it from closing. But for now, Seattle Synchro directors had to scramble to find and lock down in lease agreements all available pool space to continue the strenuous 5 1/2- to 16-hour practices per week for their competitive teams without a break. This is the very height of their competition season. We can only hope that once the community becomes aware of the closure, it will realize the severity of this loss and rally together to find some new funding solutions.
Kristina Adad is the Seattle Synchronized Swim Team director at large.
