The high cost of swimming

I was reading other blogs and comments, and one person commented on the high cost of joining a club swim team. I agree that the cost of joining a club team is expensive nowadays. So why is the cost so high? I thought about it the other day as I was planning how I was going to do lessons this next year for competitive strokes.

There is lap swimming available at the pool we use from 7:00pm - 8:00pm. It costs $3 for a swimmer to use those lap swim lanes. If you have a coach with you they also have to pay the $3 fee. That would be $6 a day just to use the pool. You practice 5 days a week for roughly 4 weeks a month. You are now shelling out $120 a month just to use the pool. What if you paid a coach $10 an hour to coach your child? That would be an additional $200, so you are now paying $320 a month to become better at swimming.

This scenario also puts the factors into play. What kind of coach do you have for $10 an hour? No other swimmers there to push the athlete to become better. No friendships made which make the hard times of swimming easier to cope with as you have friends to lean on. There are other aspects that aren't great for this formula.

I was on vacation, and I saw another community pool charging $6, and I think that was just admission on to the pool deck, so a swimmer, a coach, and a parent would be $18 a day. Wow! The cost of that program just shot up. I think the is only $2 for some pools I have seen, but they aren't normally opened all year. These facilities aren't making money hand over foot either. Our pool site said that this was a rare year where they were in the black (it could be the fact that our swim team is back using this facility on a regular basis and pool rental fees). It is the nature of the beast now. High cost of operating a pool is causing high cost of participating in swimming.

Despite our high fees, we still have between 130 - 170 athletes, so we haven't out-priced our area. The space is limited, so too much more growth we couldn't be able to handle out our base site, as it is a long course pool, but with lessons, high school sports, club water polo, masters swimming, water aerobics, and club swimming; there isn't much space for much more.