Any swim team reps in the house?
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Anonymous
This is not the case in the CSL, or at least our pool. Some pools have boards and other key volunteers who are doing those roles. The team rep is the liason between the board/pool and the CSL. They should work closely with the board and other key volunteers to ensure meets run smoothly. |
Anonymous
Disregard my previous comment. I misunderstood. Our team rep looks over the seeding for the A meet and might bring up a question or point something that results in a change, but the coaches have the final decision. |
Anonymous
Coaches have final say in MCSL also. |
Anonymous
Our team rep does it in MCSL. |
Anonymous
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Former NVSL team rep, current pool Board member, with my final swimmer graduating this year. We have been blessed with a strong culture of a hands-off Board and a good stream of parents who will step in and serve as rep for 3-4 year terms (I was 100% the least swim-qualified rep in my 15 years of being associated with the program).
Our registration is slightly down. I attribute it to how short the summer has become due to the FCPS schedule. Our current reps are doing great (It's always a challenge for a rep who has been with the team for more than a few years (and grew up in NVSL) to remember what it is like when you are brand new to NVSL summer swim. Our pool Board is filled with swim parents (and multiple former team reps) so they appreciate how hard the Rep job is and give the Reps a lot of rope. Without restarting the generation wars, getting millennial parents to volunteer is much tougher than Gen Xs. We are having a tough time getting officials, even parents who were NVSL and college swimmers. |
Anonymous
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We have an active pool Board, three excellent swim reps and a great communication / volunteer situation.
We have a very large, active swim team and even a dive team, and lots of happy returning families every year. Here’s our problem: membership is down and expenses are UP! I worry about the financial stability of the pool, not to mention outdated facilities and potential repairs. Our particular neck of the NVSL woods has way too many pools, where non-swim team families just pick the cheapest or closest pool to their house. We can’t raise rates to what we need; families will drive the extra .3 miles to the next place. |
Anonymous
Same. We have long waitlists for membership at our club- probably the longest in 7-8 years- but registrations for swim and dive have been lower every year since 2020. The current 9-10 cohort will always be anemic because they missed mini team and a lot of them missed lessons and they filled their summers with other things. Our current crop of 4-5 year olds is huge, though, so it will be interesting to see if they get involved in swim and dive in the years to come. I can't get a read on the younger parents. They're enthusiastic now when it's 1x/week lessons (our pool gets a bubble for the winter) and they can sit and chat with each other, but I'm not sure if they'll still be excited when they they're being asked to fight weekday traffic at 3:45 pm for summer swim meet volunteering. |
Anonymous
PP that you quoted here. We are nowhere near having a waitlist. Memberships have increased slightly over the past few years, but we are usually 80-100 memberships short of having a waitlist. |
Anonymous
Ah, I understand. I thought you meant registrations for swim team were down in spite of steady overall membership numbers. Our old pool was in this situation as recently as 2019- membership was down and 25% of memberships were available. What helped was that word got out to other pools with long waitlists that this pool had open memberships. 1-2 families who lived outside the area and belonged to the pool brought in a few new families from outside the area, and those brought in a few more. Then the immediate neighborhood had a lot of turnover with older people selling and young families moving in. The pool is now full with a waitlist. What helped were: a steady lesson program open to the public outside of the pool, especially when lessons were hard to come by post-covid, plus weeklong August camps for water polo and diving that attracted kids from other areas who didn't have access to summer league and wanted to try the sports recreationally. They also offered half-season trial memberships (late July through Labor Day) with no initiation fee that were limited to one summer only. This brought in a ton of families who weren't big swimmers or were new to the US and wary of a big commitment or not sure if they were pool people. If your pool doesn't have neighborhood or geographic boundaries, it really helps to reach out to families who might live in areas with long waitlists. |
Anonymous
Our membership has been improving over the past 5-8 years, but slowly. Since 2016 our membership total has grown from 235 to 268. (Bonded memberships went from 205 to 219.) We don’t have neighborhood boundaries and there is a club that’s an about half mile away or so that usually has or is close to having a waitlist. It’s also more than twice the initial cost. There is another club no more than a mile away and they both have days where they hit capacity and people have to wait to get in. We do offer late July-Labor Day memberships and our tennis programs have brought in some non-members. It’s also a club that is not very visible and we work to even get the word out about it. |
Anonymous
I'm the PP you're replying to and we struggled with the visibility thing- our pool is at the edge of a ravined area and behind a stand of large trees. The nearby pools (very similar distance to what you're describing) are in huge, open grassy areas and one is near a public park. A few things we learned along the way: 1. some people just want to be "where everyone else is" no matter what, even if it requires a line on a hot day. You can't fight that. 2. we added a signboard out front and that's really helped visibility. We advertise things like open memberships (especially during that first hot week of summer), camps, food trucks, etc. and keep it fresh. It's at a 2-way stop, which helps. 3. we host Wednesday night food trucks and the other pools do not. Families from the neighborhood come by even if they're not members, and eventually some of those families became members. We don't live near any good takeout places so it's very popular in the summer. 4. advertise to families at elementary schools, events, etc. beyond the neighboring pools. Instead of fighting for the same pool of people, it helps to bring in people without nearby pool access. At various points we used targeted Facebook ads, mailers to certain zip codes, and we also left fliers at libraries and community centers with swim lessons but only indoor pools. Capturing families who are graduating from preschool lessons and looking for the next step in their swimming lives was a big help. 5. open up swim team-only memberships. This was popular among families who had aged out of hanging out at the pool or had just 1-2 kids left at home and didn't want the cost of their former club, but who had kids who wanted to do a few more years of summer swim in MS and HS. It helped keep our swim team alive during those leaner years when our membership was aging or too young. |
Anonymous
| The A Reps with a supportive board that does not meddle, a committee that helps the rep, and parents who volunteer are lucky. We have a group that wants to micromanage everything. It’s pretty pathetic. We’ll see how the season pans out. |