Pools scarce in metro

Provincial swim team’s coach can’t book practice time for squad

By PAT LEE Staff Reporter
HALIFAX — You don’t have to tell Lance Cansdale that there’s a shortage of swimming pools in metro.

As coach of the Nova Scotia provincial swim team, he can’t even schedule training sessions for the squad as there is virtually no pool time available in the Halifax area.

And forget holding a national-level swim meet. We don’t even come close.

"Half of our season is the long course (in a 50-metre pool), and trying to get long-course time in this town is very, very difficult," said Cansdale, also coach of the Halifax Trojans. "It’s very, very rare."

Dalplex and Centennial are the only 50-metre pools in the province and like every other pool in town, they’re packed to the gills from morning until night with users taking swimming lessons, doing laps, diving, playing water polo, learning to scuba dive or doing water aerobics.

Some groups — most notably one calling itself Build It Right — have been pressing hard for council to approve a plan for a 50-metre pool to be built at the new Mainland Common off Lacewood Drive, and not a smaller one as has been suggested.

It has been proposed that a new 25-metre pool would replace the aging Northcliffe facility, considered to be among the worst in the city and not to be replaced when it shuts its doors.

Centennial Pool, built in 1968, is also not in great shape and is not up to par for major swim meets.

Not surprisingly, Swim Nova Scotia and its affiliated clubs also think Halifax is in need of the larger pool, ideally with an accompanying warm-up pool, that would allow the city to host major national and international swim meets, which no city in Atlantic Canada can currently do.

"We were slated to have the Eastern national championship here last year and it ended up going back to Toronto," said Cansdale, a former executive director of Swim B.C. "The only pool that it could have held it was Dal and we don’t have a warm-up or warm-down facility, so we lost that meet. Because it’s an Olympic year, that meet pulled in some of the best swimmers in the country, and it had over 700 entrants that would have been coming to Halifax."

Swim Nova Scotia executive director Bette El-Hawary said pool times are so tight in the city that there are more than 200 people on waiting lists to join swim programs offered through clubs like the Dartmouth Crusaders. She said it’s been two years since they’ve been able to get training times for the provincial team at a pool in the city and if they are offered any times, it’s for one or two lanes at 9 p.m. on a Saturday.

"That’s not acceptable," she said. "The city hasn’t put together a really strong vision for recreation and physical activity."

El-Hawary said her group had been waiting in the wings to see the outcome of the Commonwealth Games bid, which would have brought a new 50-metre pool to the city, but now are supporters of one at Mainland Common due to its proximity to so many users.

The argument against a new 50-metre pool is, not surprisingly, the price tag of $28 million to $30 million, about twice the price of replacing the 25-metre Northcliffe pool.

Swim Nova Scotia also argues that the larger pool is needed just to accommodate the number of users clamouring for pool time for a variety of programs. And they’re not just elite swim clubs.

Cansdale, who is taking a team of Nova Scotia swimmers to the Olympic trials in Montreal this week, said a 50-metre pool offers much more flexibility than a smaller version. Divided up among users, he said it can host a multitude of activities at the same time.

"I can have an open swim, I can have a birthday party, I can have a swim club. It can be split up," he said, adding that a rumoured proposal to increase a 25-foot pool to eight lanes from six will not solve the problem.

"It’ll be over-programmed. It’s already over-programmed."

Plans for Mainland Common have been in the works for several years, but the city has yet to announce details for the facility.

Digging at the site has started, fuelling speculation about the plans.

(plee@herald.ca)