And the ESPY goes to....

I apologize for my glass half empty view, but it comes from personal/professional experience. Lately there has been a lot of budget cuts in Portland Parks and Recreation - this summer they shut down two of their pools because of lack of funds, other facilities have shut down or severly cut back on services, even Seattle is having a rough time of it. I was actually responsible for a program similiar to what Rain man mentions. Our program started at the beginning of the school year where we took High School students from the local school district and began training them to be swim instructors, after two months these newly trained instructors would then teach swim lessons to the school districts 3rd and 4th grade elementary students. As budgeting became tighter, the Park and Recreation district decided they didn'y want to pay my portion of salary while I was conducting this program because it didn't benefit the Parks District and the School district didn't want to pay my portion of the salary to conduct this program so it was dropped. The facility I worked at was actually quite profitable in regards to pools (we usually covered 90% or better of our operating costs - the national average I believe is under 50%). This is just one example, another example is we recently had several drowings along a stretch of river, the cities have decided to buck-up and pay to have lifeguards stationed there which will cost them about 50k (and this took a while to resolve and several deaths). I just can't see a city/agency spending 75k on a program when it can't even find enough money to keep its facilities open. I know I sound very negative, swimming is definitely very worthwhile as a sport, hobby, distraction whatever you want to call, but reality is it takes alot of money to keep a pool open compared to a soccer field, baseball diamond or a basketball court.

I apologize for my glass half empty view, but it comes from personal/professional experience. Lately there has been a lot of budget cuts in Portland Parks and Recreation - this summer they shut down two of their pools because of lack of funds, other facilities have shut down or severly cut back on services, even Seattle is having a rough time of it. I was actually responsible for a program similiar to what Rain man mentions. Our program started at the beginning of the school year where we took High School students from the local school district and began training them to be swim instructors, after two months these newly trained instructors would then teach swim lessons to the school districts 3rd and 4th grade elementary students. As budgeting became tighter, the Park and Recreation district decided they didn'y want to pay my portion of salary while I was conducting this program because it didn't benefit the Parks District and the School district didn't want to pay my portion of the salary to conduct this program so it was dropped. The facility I worked at was actually quite profitable in regards to pools (we usually covered 90% or better of our operating costs - the national average I believe is under 50%). This is just one example, another example is we recently had several drowings along a stretch of river, the cities have decided to buck-up and pay to have lifeguards stationed there which will cost them about 50k (and this took a while to resolve and several deaths). I just can't see a city/agency spending 75k on a program when it can't even find enough money to keep its facilities open. I know I sound very negative, swimming is definitely very worthwhile as a sport, hobby, distraction whatever you want to call, but reality is it takes alot of money to keep a pool open compared to a soccer field, baseball diamond or a basketball court.