‘It’s all ours’
New Russellville Aquatics Center set to open
The Russellville Aquatic Center is ready to make a big splash.
Mayor Randy Horton said the $6.6 million aquatics center was completed 2 1/2 months ahead of schedule. “It’s all ours now,” he said.
The official ribbon cutting is scheduled from 4-6 p.m. June 29.
The M.J. Hickey Pool, which opened in 1978, is the city-run outdoor facility. It will be open this summer as well, Horton said.
He said the 24,800-square-foot indoor facility at 1300 N. Phoenix Ave. is getting rave reviews already.
“People who have actually gone in and seen it … they’re pretty thrilled with what it looks like. It’s a beautiful, beautiful facility,” he said.
The exterior is block, metal and glass. Inside, stained laminated-wood arches on the ceiling add a wow factor. The structure sits on a picturesque 22-acre site with a view of pastures and woods.
The facility features a therapy/exercise pool; an eight-lane, 25-yard competition pool, which will also be used for recreational swimming; and a splash pad for kids that has “buckets” hanging from palm trees that dump water on children playing.
Horton said he’s seen the splash pad in action.
“They had it going day before yesterday, and it’s really cool,” he said more than a week ago. “I can see kids having a really great time.”
The building has a meeting/ party room that can be divided into two rooms that hold up to 50 people each.
“A big part of your revenue is party-room rental,” he said.
The center is being paid for with a 1-cent sales tax, which 60 percent of residents voted in 2013 to renew. The annual operating cost of the aquatics scenter is estimated to be “in the low $400,000 range — $415,000 to $420,000 — and that’s with employees,” Horton said.
A few months before the city was going to start promoting the sales-tax renewal, Arkansas Tech University in Russellville closed its indoor pool. A focus group was formed in January 2012 to explore the indoor facility.
The aquatics center is west of Arkansas Tech.
“We’re talking about some partnership deals with the university because our property joins theirs,” Horton said. “We don’t have anything at all firm yet, but we’re looking at a couple of different things.”
When the Arkansas Tech pool closed, it left the Russellville High School swim team without a place to practice. The team utilized the Hendrix College pool in Conway for a while, then traveled to Clarksville.
Horton said the Russellville High School swim team will utilize the new city facility.
“They’re definitely going to use it, and all the team members will have to have a season pass or something,” he said. “We’ve got to pay to operate the thing. They’re raising money for a scoreboard and timing systems.”
Russellville High School swim coach Gary Knudsen said the team looks forward to its new home.
“Since Tech closed its pool, the number of swimmers on the high school team has dwindled, but we still had a dedicated few who stayed with the program, and several who excelled,” he said. “We had as many as 18 and as few as nine, depending on the year. I think our numbers will be up significantly, due to the new facility, not having to bus to Clarksville for practices and some of our swimmers’ recent success.”
Knudsen said the high school will use the Russellville Aquatics Center five days a week in the afternoons, starting in October and going through the end of February.
“We plan on hosting four meets per year and will probably bid on hosting conference championships in the near future,” he said.
Knudsen was a member of the design team for the new facility, along with Mack Hollis, director of Russellville Recreation & Parks, and ETC Engineers & Architects of Little Rock.
Van Horn Construction Co. of Russellville served as the project manager.
“The eight-lane competitive pool is very impressive, as are the beautiful laminated wooden beams, which support the roof. I also think the public will be impressed as well, not only with the competitive pool, but with the therapy pool at one end and the splash pad and party rooms at the other,” Knudsen said.
He said another advantage of the indoor facility will be that swimming lessons can be held year-round.
The aquatics center will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays; weekends may have different hours, Horton said.
He said the new facility will have a staff of about 22.
“We’re still trying to get people hired and get them Red Cross-certified,” Horton said.
TR Santos of Memphis, Tennessee, was hired as aquaticscenter director. He moved to Russellville about five weeks ago.
“I thought it was an incredible opportunity for a community that never had year-round aquatics,” he said. “I thought, ‘I can’t pass this up.’”
A native of California, Santos said he has coached competitive swimming most of his life. Immediately prior to being hired in Russellville, he was a competitive-swim coach at The Racquet Club of Memphis. He is also a former director of Kids Across America, part of Kanakuk Camps in Branson, Missouri.
“I have a real passion for aquatics in general,” he said.
Santos said he has been inside aquatic centers all over the country, and the Russellville center is top-notch.
“The building is just beautiful, and the wood on the top — again, being in the swim world, I’ve been at aquatics centers all over the country. To have something that looks so warm, so genuine and have that eightlane pool … it’s so well thought through, with a splash pad and therapeutic pool,” Santos said.
Horton said although it took several years to get the aquatics facility going — there were differences in opinion about where to build it and what amenities to include — it was a smooth process once it started.
“Once we got it going, we had good weather. We had a great team between our architect and our construction manager; they worked well together. They were constantly looking a month, two months down the road, looking at a problem before it became a problem,” he said.
“We already have our architects working on Phase 2, which is the outdoor part of it,” Horton said.
That means more funding. “We have to look at that first to see exactly what our needs are, and then we’ll start talking about a solution,” he said. “We want to get it built. It’s what are we willing to fund and at what point in time? And it’s going to be equally nice as what we’ve done for the inside. We just couldn’t do it all at one time.”