Slimantics: Moncrief Pool: Champion needed

I am a competent, if not proficient swimmer. At least, I used to be. Honestly, I haven’t been swimming in decades and, at age 62, I suspect my swimming skills would be rated no more than adequate.

Even so, I’m a big advocate of swimming and not exclusively – or even primarily – as a form of recreation. More and more, I believe the primary importance of swimming is a matter of public health. Surrounded as we are by so many bodies of water, learning to swim is a survival skill, something everyone should know how to do.

As a child growing up in the 60s and 70s, swimming was as big a part of childhood as little league baseball and bike-riding. The little public pool I visited almost every summer day was packed with kids. The entrance fee of a quarter kept the pool maintained and staffed, most often by older teens on summer break from college. A snack bar provided additional funding.

For some of the kids, learning to swim evolved mostly by proximity. Spend three or four hours a day four, or five days a week at a pool and you acquired basic skills incrementally until you were suddenly a swimmer. Some kids got on the fast-track to learning to swim through Red Cross swimming lessons, where you could learn the basic strokes in a couple of weeks.

Others learned to swim and did most of their swimming at “swimming holes,” although that was not my experience.

Without coming across as an Ancient, the times were different then. By the age of 10 or so, the children of my youth enjoyed a freedom scarcely imaginable today. Left to our own devices, we learned all sorts of things, swimming being one of them. Any summer day we could scrounge up a quarter, we could make the independent decision of heading to the public pool.

Now, it seems kids’ activities are almost exclusively organized and scheduled, which means kids today spend less time doing the things my generation did spontaneously for hours and hours.

Today, there are fewer and fewer public pools. Columbus hasn’t had one in ages. Starkville’s lone remaining public pool, at Moncrief Park, was shut down to repair major leaks in the pool and re-roof the bathroom/dressing room building after a car crashed into the structure last summer. That work will cost the city about $100,000

The repairs to the leaks are pretty much a stop-gap effort because the jury is out as far as the future of the pool is concerned. Permanent repairs could cost far more than what has been spent already. To justify that cost, the usage of the pool will have to be far greater than last summer’s average of 34 swimmers per day, less than half capacity.

The pool opens for the summer on May 27 and the city will be closely monitoring its use.

It would be foolish to assume that kids are suddenly going to flock to Moncrief pool for no other reason than city officials are watching.

What Moncrief Pool needs now is a champion.

We can all think of examples where one dedicated, determined person can create something that rallies a community. That’s what Moncrief Pool needs, an advocate for swimming, someone to organize kids swim groups, raise funds to cover the admission fees for children who don’t have the money, someone to attract sponsors for events and leagues, someone to advocate for additional funds from the city’s parks department, which apparently has no qualms about lavishing huge amounts of money on youth baseball programs.

Nothing against baseball, but my life has never relied on being able to hit a curveball. Being able to swim can – and does – save lives.

It’s also a fabulous way for a kid to spend a summer afternoon.

So, yeah, I’m rooting for Moncrief Pool this summer mainly because I’m rooting for the kids, for their fun and, yes, their safety.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is ssmith@cdispatch.com.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is ssmith@cdispatch.com.