New heater project will make Vestavia Hills Aquatic Complex pool available year-round

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It’s almost pool season at the Vestavia Hills Aquatic Complex again, but this year, there’s a new project underway that will greatly expand pool season to make it 12 months out of the year.

The Vestavia Hills City Council in March agreed to spend almost $460,000 to add two heaters to the competition pool at the Aquatic Complex at Wald Park.

Preliminary work, including installing natural gas lines, began in April. This year, the pool once again will open the Friday before Memorial Day (May 22) and close around Labor Day. But then the heaters will be installed, enabling the pool to reopen with heated water likely by late October or Nov. 1, said Jamie Lee, director of the Vestavia Hills Parks and Leisure Services.

From that point on, the pool will be usable year round, greatly expanding opportunities, Lee said.

In the past, as temperatures warmed in the spring, people would email and call, asking if the city could open the pool earlier than Memorial Day, Lee said. When it’s 80 degrees in April, people are ready to jump in the water, he said. The same thing happens in the fall when warmer temperatures linger around, he said.

COMPETITIVE TEAMS

Beyond recreational use, there’s also great demand by people who use the pool for exercise with lap swims and by competitive swim and dive teams, Lee said. Those teams tend to operate year round and are always looking for pool space, he said.

James Barber, the head coach for the Birmingham Swim League, which has 65 to 70 youth swimmers right now, said heating the pool at the Vestavia Hills Aquatic Complex will be a very positive thing for competitive swimming in the Birmingham area.

While swimmers in the Birmingham Swim League come from across the metro area, the majority of them are from the Vestavia, Homewood, Mountain Brook and Hoover communities, Barber said.

Having a heated pool centrally located in the heart of Vestavia Hills is a huge advantage for parents and kids, he said.

“It’s great to have a location that’s closer to where people live so you’re more convenient,” Barber said. “If you’re running any sports organization, at the end of the day, if you’re not convenient to the people you’re providing the service for, they’ll just do something else. For so long, in the sport of competitive swimming, most of the facilities that are available aren’t tied to convenient locations, and the sport really suffers because of it.”

In the Birmingham area, it has been an uphill battle for decades to get competitive swimming facilities where they need to be, Barber said. This has stunted growth of the sport and kept the Birmingham area swim community from growing, he said.

Mobile has 300 to 400 swimmers on its swim team, and Huntsville has one team with more than 600 swimmers and two or three others with 150 swimmers each, Barber said. There’s no reason Birmingham shouldn’t have as many swimmers other than a lack of access to convenient facilities with available swim time, he said.

Currently, his team practices at the Birmingham CrossPlex and Lakeshore Foundation, he said. The Birmingham CrossPlex is a great facility, but being in Ensley is just not as convenient, he said. The pool at the Lakeshore Foundation in Homewood is also fantastic, but there’s not enough available pool time, he said.

“Being able to take our older group to Vestavia, starting to practice in the fall — we’re very excited about it,” Barber said. “We’re excited the city of Vestavia Hills is doing that, and we can’t wait to get in the facility.

“Hopefully swimming starts to catch on further in Birmingham like it has in other cities,” he said. “I think it’s going to help us to help solidify and help to grow in a way that we can start to compete with those other big cities in the state.

‘BLUE LIPS’

His team practiced at the Vestavia Hills Aquatic Complex last year until the second or third week in October, when it got too cold, Barber said. “There were some blue lips for some of those swimmers being out there,” he said.

Because the Vestavia Hills Aquatic Complex is outdoors, it’s still a little bit of a disadvantage for younger swimmers, but for older athletes, it should be fine, he said.

Barber was the associate head coach for the University of Alabama swim team for about 16 years, “and we swam outside at Alabama the last six years or so I was there,” he said. “We had an outdoor pool, and we would go swim outside when it was 10 degrees … and we had a nice indoor Olympic-sized pool to practice in. It’s nice to have the fresh air.”

Exactly how many swimmers will take advantage of Vestavia’s heated pool depends on how much space is available, he said. “We’ll fill up whatever space is out there one way or another,” he said. “When it does get colder, you don’t want to stay too late at night, [but] … we’ll take advantage of everything they have to offer.”

Bryan Jennings, head coach for the Wake Aquatics swim team and a Vestavia Hills resident, echoed Barber’s sentiment. He currently has 200 to 250 kids from Vestavia Hills in his summer swimming and diving league and about 50 swimmers who swim year round, he said. Finding heated space in the winter is hard, he said.

The YMCA and Life Time Fitness have heated pools, but they have to provide lane space for their members, Jennings said. There is not really anything in the way of public pools, he said. About the only place he can get a good block of time is the CrossPlex, but it’s often tough for parents to make that drive, especially if they have multiple kids involved in multiple sports and activities, he said.

Statistics from USA Swimming show that most parents nationally prefer to find a pool that’s within a nine-minute drive, Jennings said.

He expects having another heated pool in Vestavia Hills will help him grow his team as well, he said. He currently has two coaches and is about to hire a third so he can expand again, he said. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he had 135 swimmers, he said.

Lee said having a heated pool at the Vestavia Hills Aquatic Complex may make it possible to add some water aerobics classes as well — not in the summer, but in the spring and fall when demand for pool time slows down. There also will be more opportunities for people to rent the pool for swim parties, he said.

FINANCES

The costs for operating the pool will go up with the cost of natural gas and the need to hire additional lifeguards and other personnel, but the additional revenue should offset that, Lee said. He expects the pool heaters will pay for themselves within a couple of years, he said.

The Vestavia Hills Parks and Recreation Board is keeping the cost for a regular summer membership the same as it was last year, but the board is offering additional options for the period between Labor Day and Dec. 31 and the period between Jan. 1 and the Friday before Memorial Day.

The pool heater project turned out to be more expensive than originally anticipated. City officials initially budgeted $300,000 to install the heaters. When the project initially was put out for bid, only one company bid on the job, offering to do it for $634,698. City officials reduced the scope of the work requested and rebid it, this time getting two bidders. The low bidder turned out to be Cox Pools Service at $456,228. That was $178,000 less (or 28% less) than the first bid.

While the project still was over budget, the city should have enough in its overall capital project budget to cover the overage, City Manager Jeff Downes said.