Swim club pushing for Olympic-size pool in city
Advocates say 50-meter facility would bring better training, ease space crunch and attract dollars
Swimmers, parents and coaches of the growing Temecula Swim Club want the city to build a 50-meter Olympic-size, pool in Temecula.
Members of the Temecula Tritons said the team’s competitive and younger swimmers need a bigger space to practice and host meets. Coaches and parents are tired of swimmers being packed into a pool or rushed out for the next scheduled activity. A 50-meter pool — the standard size used in the Olympics — could solve both problems, they contend.
“The pools we use get very crowded at times,” said 10-yearold Temecula resident Brooke Bollin, who joined the Tritons in December after swimming for years at a bigger pool in Mission Viejo. “People bump into each other. We need more space.”
The club, which caters to all levels of swimmers in the Temecula Valley, has more than 300 members — from beginners to competitive youth, high school and college swimmers. The Tritons
have grown exponentially during the coronavirus pandemic, making pool space and practice times limited.
The team practices yearround at several smaller pools it rents because it has no facility of its own. For more than a decade, the Tritons have swam at Great Oak and Chaparral high schools in Temecula and at Murrieta Mesa High School, the city-run Community Recreation Center and a water park with a 50-meter competition pool in Perris. But it shares all these pools with school aquatics teams, city programs and the public.
In 2010, surveyed residents cited a bigger pool when asked what they’d like to see in their city’s quality of life master plan. In 2020, the city recognized the need for more aquatics facilities — including a 50-meter pool — in its community services master plan. However, it didn’t consider such a pool a “high priority” need.
“The cost to build and maintain a 50-meter pool would not support the benefit of serving a small population of long competitive swimmers,” the report said.
The Temecula City Council plans to discuss the “development of an aquatics center” at the request of Council Member James Stewart.
Tritons coach Jennifer Beech, who has been with the team for more than 10 years, called her club’s situation a “big disadvantage.”
“As a coach, we always want to set our team up for success and knowing (the pool size) is hindering that success just kills me,” Beech said. “We don’t have the space. I hate the idea of turning people away who want to try the sport.”
Beech and her swimmers say the city-run pools — which are 25 yards long and range in the number of lanes — are crowded.
Since 1998, the swim club has used the city’s Community
Recreation Center pool, which is 25 yards and has six lanes, Community Services Manager Gwen Willcox said. But the Tritons must share the water with Temecula’s many aquatics programs, including swimming lessons, lap and recreational swimmers, water aerobics exercisers and lifeguards in training.
In early 2021, the city approved plans to include a 25yard pool at the Margarita Recreation Center, which will be torn down and renovated. The new facility is tentatively set to open in summer 2023, Willcox said.
The city’s community services master plan says the new Margarita center pool “would fulfill most of the aquatic needs identified.” Team members said that’s a start, but believe a bigger space is still needed.
By contrast, Olympic-size pools are typically 2 meters deep with 10 lanes. Though typically used by competitive swimmers in spring and summer, Beech said a longer and wider pool could be divided in half, which could double the swimmers, practices and programs.
Swim club board members said a bigger pool would let the city host bigger meets — including high school championships, national meets, Olympic-level trials and water polo competitions. Such events would bring more visitors and dollars to Temecula, as Southern California gets closer to hosting the 2028 Olympic Games.
Pool time isn’t cheap for the club. James Schneider, the Temecula Swim Club’s treasurer, said the Tritons spend a third of its budget — more than $120,000 a year — on pool rentals and still deal with double-booking situations or chlorine issues that close the pool down. The money could be used toward coaching and better equipment, he said.
Beech said the most impacted group is the “10-andunders” who are learning their strokes and getting ready for competition. Many youths — who got interested in swimming during the pandemic — joined the team in the past year, practicing in the Community Recreation Center pool five days a week after school.
Beech also coaches swimming at Murrieta Mesa High, which gives the Tritons access to the school’s 25-yard, 10-lane pool, where most of the high school-age and competitive groups practice daily. But the club shares that pool with the high school’s swim and water polo teams.
Beech said the team lost pool practice time at Great Oak, Temecula Valley and Chaparral high schools, which have their own aquatics teams. Many swimmers drive from Temecula to Murrieta Mesa.
“We’re in a situation where there’s sometimes eight to 10 kids in a lane, multiple age groups and different levels swimming at the same time,” said Brooke Bollin’s mother, Rachel Bollin. “Coaches have huge groups and are pulled in different directions and can’t give the attention they need to based on skill level. Then the kids go to a meet and compete at a long course pool and it’s so different. They’re not used to it.”
Bollin fears that her daughter, who dreams of swimming for Stanford University, will have to leave the Temecula Swim Club to get practice time.
Board secretary Kate Sinclair agreed, saying teammates “don’t get the endurance training they need” without a long pool. Her daughter, Rowan, has driven more than 40 minutes to the nearest 50-meter pool at the DropZone Waterpark in Perris.
“In a long-distance pool, you work harder,” said Rowan Sinclair, 16, who hopes to swim in college. “You can get a faster time. It’s less U-turning or flip turns.”
Beech said that the club has lost senior-level members who “felt their training was being hindered” and moved to bigger facilities or to teams with access to such pools.
In the Inland Empire, these include the Riverside Aquatics Complex at Riverside City College, which boasts a 65-meter competition pool and the Riverside Aquatics Association, which practices in the cityrun Sippy Woodhead pool — which is 50 meters long from the diving board to the shallow end — or Riverside’s Shamel Park pool, which is 25 meters long.