The Yass Valley Council voted 8-1 in favour of releasing an expression of interest for the lease of the Yass Memorial Pool site on Wednesday night, and the necessary process to make that happen will now commence.
One of the obvious winners from the possibility of a heated pool in Yass is the Yass Swimming Club.
Yass Swimming Club Committee Member Donna Wullaert spoke to the most significant benefit for Yass’ swimmers and their families.
“For the kids of Yass especially that swim competitively, the ability to train for 12 months of the year in our local town instead of commuting an hour each way to Canberra, will obviously be a huge benefit.”
“It would also open up opportunities for all the kids that do only swim three months of the year because having to travel to Canberra is too much. To let them swim all year round and be much more competitive against the kids in all the other towns that have those same opportunities,” she said.
Whilst members of the public have raised concerns regarding the effect on cost at the swimming pool under private ownership, Donna believes it’ll be a cost parents will quickly transition to, if it saves them from the long commutes.
“As long as the coaching standards are similar to what the kids are getting in Canberra I think time is money and commuting an hour each way is a lot on parents and there’s lots of our members that do it every day all year round.”
“I know of at least 20 that travel to Canberra a minimum of two times a week and some five times a week, all year round currently. I think if they had the opportunity to do it all year round in Yass, you’d have a whole lot more kids that’d get on board and swim a lot more,” she said.
This is one of the major reasons the swimming club loses most of its swimmers once they reach their high school years.
“In terms of our older members, this season we only had maybe 3 or 4 swimmers who were over the age of 14.”
“I think once kids get to high school, if they’re then commuting to Canberra after school for swimming and not getting back until half past seven at night, which is what most of the high school level kids are doing.”
“They then have got to have dinner, have a shower, and start homework at 8 o’clock at night, it is pretty tough,” said Donna.
The nature of competitive swimming means it’s a challenging sport to pick up seasonally, and you can quickly lose progression with time out of the water.
“It’s really tough with a really short season. Swimming’s a bit different to other sports, it’s all about lung capacity, and when you’ve had such a big portion of the year out of the water, it’s really hard to get to competing at a really competitive level by the end of January when all the school carnivals and things start happening.”
“If you can keep that going throughout the year it makes a big difference and when kids succeed in things they realise they like it and want to keep doing it and doing it more, so it would definitely be a positive thing,” said Donna.
Donna says that even in their swimming season, the current pool can be very difficult to warm up, and many of the littler kids struggle in the cold waters.
“The struggle for us as well with the pool being old, is the water temperature in Yass. It’s just so cold on little kids and that’s why we lose a lot of kids to Canberra because of their indoor facilities.”
“With the depth of that deep end it’s just so much water to try and heat, and it’s really hard on those little kids that don’t have much meat on them to stay warm.”
“There’s been kids I’ve seen struggle for years at Yass trying to train and shiver, and cry because they’re so cold, and then they go to Canberra and just love it because it’s warm and it’s indoors,” she said.
Yass swimming has historically outperformed the resources at its disposal. However, Donna believes an indoor heated pool could help even more of the region’s swimmers reach their potential.
“Yass has produced some really good swimmers over the years and I think there’s definitely some talent there and they’re fighters.”
“If they can get through the conditions they’ve had to swim in out here, then they generally do quite well when they get to Canberra,” she said with a chuckle.
Max O’Driscoll
