Reply to Arlington proposing to close county gymnastics program

Forum Index » Sports General Discussion

Reply to "Arlington proposing to close county gymnastics program"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I definitely don’t think they’re going to sell Barcroft. That doesn’t make a lot of sense in any direction I can see and would have needed a huge proposal of its own. For those unfamiliar with Barcroft, it isn’t used exclusively for gymnastics either. There are a bunch of programs operating out of Barcroft.

The original letter said if adopted, the proposal would close Barcroft for one year. Then there was something (a slide? I can’t remember) which used the language of using the facility for “other operational” purposes. This made it seem like the whole facility. Then there was the small amount of discussion at the board meeting where it seemed like the proposal was entirely based on gymnastics not being fee supported and the gap being too large (with no details). Anyone know if people who are strictly facilities received termination notices? That would give a pretty strong clue.

It seems kind of weird to just leave the entire facility sitting for a year. I’m skeptical about that, I think the more likely scenario is they leave the original gymnastics space and immediately begin repurposing the court side for programs that may be more profitable. If parks and rec decide to restart a gymnastics program, it will be easier to do so from a “clean start.”

The original gymnastics space isn’t easy to immediately repurpose with minimal investment, since it has in ground pits. But they could just move all the stuff on the court side.

I went looking earlier and found information from the time of the expansion. At that point gymnastics was considered profitable based on parks and rec budget. So all this has happened in the last ten years. I don’t know if 8 can say the expansion alone is the breaking point. Obviously a lot of changes were made the management structure of the program since then. But the expansion also comes with other opportunity costs, of course.

[/quote]
I think it was profitable until they didn't fully re-staff after covid. There was a huge gap where gymnastics employees were furloughed and it really hurt the program. On top of that there were also competitive gymnasts who dropped out of gymnastics because they lost their skills and conditioning during the shutdown, making some of the upper levels smaller than they used to be. It doesn't mean the pipeline is refilling but it's a multi-year process.  DPR also hasn't been restaffing and offering more classes the way they need to bring the program back fully.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics