2008 Woodie Awards
Start Over on the SRF Pool
Guest Opinion
Issue date: 9/4/06 Section: Opinions
- Page 1 of 1
It is time for Campus Recreation to acknowledge that the aquatic facility in the new Student Recreation Facility is an abysmal failure. That's obvious to all who visit it and work in it. The lap pool gets by far the most use, but it's disastrously designed and dangerously overcrowded. The "leisure pool"-vortex, lazy river, bubble couch, beach, fountain, and waterfall-is a colossal waste of space: it gets checked out once by new patrons but otherwise goes unused. It's time to tear it up and bring in a new architect to start over.
The lap pool is too small (down to 3 lanes from the 6 in CCC), too shallow for proper racing turns, too warm (in order to accommodate the hoped-for users of the leisure pool), too turbulent (as an outflow from the lazy river), and ill-suited for backstrokers (because the irregular ceiling doesn't let swimmers see when to turn). The basic problem was trying to combine in the same space and the same body of water what cannot be combined, a play area for chilling out and a lap pool for athletic workouts, and then privileging the former over the latter, giving most of the area to a leisure pool that almost no one uses. The people have voted with their arms, legs and feet. Only the spa, a large-scale Jacuzzi not connected to the rest of the pool, gets regular use.
Serious swimmers are persevering with the lap pool, but they will leave in discouragement if something is not done to address their concerns. Their departure would represent a net loss to the fitness of the campus community and a blow to UIC's aspiration to be regarded as a grown-up university with first-rate facilities. Think of Northwestern's Norris Aquatic Center, or, to cite a university with more modest resources, the world-class Natatorium at IUPUI. The present lap and leisure pool will soon make UIC a laughingstock. Imagine the reaction if newcomers to the excellent, well-equipped, third-floor machine room were to find instead that two thirds of its space had been set aside for a Merry-Go-Round.
No doubt the architects who designed the facility have a good track record with cruise ships and luxury resorts. Perhaps that's what recommended them to Campus Recreation. But they had no business designing a campus pool.
What can be done? Invite bids for a thorough makeover, keeping the spa, the sauna, and the steam room and allocating most of the rest of the aquatic space for an eight-lane lap pool, which will get used. In the meantime, reopen the CCC pool, languishing empty in the basement across the street, and send the lifeguards, burdened with policing quarrels over inadequate space in the lap pool and vulnerable to long-term hearing loss due to the noisy and silly waterfall, to supervise it. It's not too late to own up to an honest mistake.
Steve Warner
Professor of Sociology
The lap pool is too small (down to 3 lanes from the 6 in CCC), too shallow for proper racing turns, too warm (in order to accommodate the hoped-for users of the leisure pool), too turbulent (as an outflow from the lazy river), and ill-suited for backstrokers (because the irregular ceiling doesn't let swimmers see when to turn). The basic problem was trying to combine in the same space and the same body of water what cannot be combined, a play area for chilling out and a lap pool for athletic workouts, and then privileging the former over the latter, giving most of the area to a leisure pool that almost no one uses. The people have voted with their arms, legs and feet. Only the spa, a large-scale Jacuzzi not connected to the rest of the pool, gets regular use.
Serious swimmers are persevering with the lap pool, but they will leave in discouragement if something is not done to address their concerns. Their departure would represent a net loss to the fitness of the campus community and a blow to UIC's aspiration to be regarded as a grown-up university with first-rate facilities. Think of Northwestern's Norris Aquatic Center, or, to cite a university with more modest resources, the world-class Natatorium at IUPUI. The present lap and leisure pool will soon make UIC a laughingstock. Imagine the reaction if newcomers to the excellent, well-equipped, third-floor machine room were to find instead that two thirds of its space had been set aside for a Merry-Go-Round.
No doubt the architects who designed the facility have a good track record with cruise ships and luxury resorts. Perhaps that's what recommended them to Campus Recreation. But they had no business designing a campus pool.
What can be done? Invite bids for a thorough makeover, keeping the spa, the sauna, and the steam room and allocating most of the rest of the aquatic space for an eight-lane lap pool, which will get used. In the meantime, reopen the CCC pool, languishing empty in the basement across the street, and send the lifeguards, burdened with policing quarrels over inadequate space in the lap pool and vulnerable to long-term hearing loss due to the noisy and silly waterfall, to supervise it. It's not too late to own up to an honest mistake.
Steve Warner
Professor of Sociology
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