Municipal pools prepare to dive in this week

Lifeguards and returning college students Emilyn Smit, Jane Taylor, Sage Hiemstra and Jacob Squires scrub and skim the plunge pool at the Siouxnami Waterpark in Sioux Center.

REGIONAL—As schools let out for the summer and temperatures start to rise, N’West Iowans are re-upping their sunscreen supply and unearthing last season's swimsuits and beach towels. In the coming week, many outdoor pools in the region will celebrate their opening days.

Twenty-four-year-old Noah Minnick remembers the childhood feeling of anticipation.

"Growing up, the pool opened Memorial Day, and after church, or if we were driving around with my parents when I was younger, we used to always have to stop at the pool parking lot and look through the fence to see if they had put water in the pool yet," Minnick said. "So, I always kind of chuckle and think about that when I’m filling the pool or working out there."

Lifeguard Kate Van Der Werff, who just finished her freshman year at Northwestern College, skims debris from the newly filled zero-entry pool at the Orange City Swimming Pool. The pool is set to open on Memorial Day, and preseason crews have been hard at work getting the pool ready.

Minnick is the assistant parks and recreation director for Orange City, and next month, the 2021 graduate of Northwestern College in Orange City will take over in the director position when current director Mitch Aalbers moves to a new role with the MOC-Floyd Valley School District.

"Three years ago, they put me in charge of aquatics," Minnick said. "I’ll keep doing that when I’m director."

Minnick, a former lifeguard who graduated with an elementary education degree, did not know anything about pool maintenance, but despite the steep learning curve, he has become well-versed in the vocabulary of pool pumps, skimmers and suction lines.

Like many area pools, the season at the Orange City Municipal Aquatic Facility runs Memorial Day to Labor Day, weather permitting.

In the Midwest, opening day at the pool heralds the true start of summer, but while children wait with anticipation for their first summer dive, other members of the community spend weeks before the start of the season doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

There are pumps to get back into working order after a long Iowa winter, and there are leaves and grime to clear from empty pools. Lifeguard shacks need cleaning and reorganizing. Empty concession stands need to be restocked with cold drinks and snacks.

"We’ve been out here every day, getting ready," said Dave Egdorf, director of the All Seasons Center in Sioux Center. "We shut down the whole month of May just to get ready to go."

Siouxnami Waterpark is part of the All Seasons Center and the facility is the first of its kind in the region. It features multiple slides, including a harrowing blue speed slide, plus a rock-climbing wall, multiple pools, a splash pad and a lazy river. Record attendance days at the All Seasons Center peak at nearly 2,000 guests, with traffic coming in from across the region.

"As soon as we have nice weather, and all the snow's melted, the first thing we really do is just power wash everything — get all the dirt, grime, everything off from the winter," Egdorf said.

A lifeguard preps a tunnel slid at Siouxnami Waterpark in Sioux Center.

Each spring, a group of students from Sioux Center High School comes out and sets out all the lounge chairs — there are hundreds, bearing classic white, yellow and blue stripes. Egdorf and his lifeguards wax the body slides — the gentle, curving descent makes the job safe and easy. The nearly perpendicular speed slide is another matter.

"The blue slide — one of my firefighter buddies comes in, and he ties off at the top and lowers himself down. He waxes that one," Egdorf said. "It costs a lot of money to get companies to do it, so we try to do it ourselves."

Like Egdorf, Minnick waits for the first thaw to get out to the Orange City pool and assess where things are at.

"Once the snow is melted, I head out there and get an idea of what needs to be fixed, or what we need to pay attention to," he said. "Iowa can be a pretty harsh place in the winter, and outdoor pools kind of take a beating."

The Hospers Community Swimming Pool is set to open Saturday, May 27, making it one of the earliest outdoor pools to open in the region. The old-school, no-frills pool has drawn swimmers from different communities for many decades, and while Hospers city clerk Rachel Jungers is not officially in charge of the facility, she has had a busy week.

"Technically, my position is not supposed to have a ton to do with the pool. But because of the size of the city, this week, I’m just running around with my head cut off to get ready for the pool to open," Jungers said.

Five lifeguards spent Tuesday evening in the pool, scrubbing the walls by hand before the start of the season. Other community members pitched in this spring, too, and in April, a local 4-H group did their part by clearing the pool of leaves and debris as a community service project.

Assistant parks and recreation director Noah Minnick cleans the empty plunge pool at the Orange City Swimming Pool on Tuesday. Minnick, who will become parks and rec director in June, oversees Orange City's aquatic facility.

In Rock Valley, residents went last summer without a pool. This year, they are anticipating the opening of the community's new pool, which replaces the aging facility formerly in its place. Rock Valley's new pool was approved near the end of 2021, when a $3.5 million bond vote passed by a wide margin. The project received an additional $1.2 million raised by community group, Pool Together RV.

"We are at the point right now where they are finalizing and getting ready for the safety inspection. So, that will happen hopefully in the next week," said pool manager Alyssa Van't Hul. "We’re hoping to open June 5."

The new Rock Valley facility features a zero-entry pool and a mini lazy river and a family body slide wide enough to accommodate several swimmers at a time.

Van't Hul is a physical education teacher at Rock Valley Christian School during the year, and she has been pool manager in Rock Valley for three decades. Along with preparing the physical facility, Van't Hul said the biggest preseason challenge is the push to hire enough lifeguards.

"I would say for sure in the last five years, if not a few more, it's been, it has been a challenge — staffing is probably one of the most difficult things," Van't Hul said.

This year, because the Rock Valley facility features new amenities, Van't Hul will need around 20 lifeguards, double the number she had the last summer the pool was open. To remain open, pools are required by the state to have a certain number of lifeguards posted at their stations, and that number is determined by the facility's size and its different amenities. Slides and lazy rivers, for instance, require additional guards.

Egdorf said hiring has grown increasingly difficult over the years for a variety of reasons, but one factor is the growing number of activities high school and college students are committing to during the summer. Once a hallmark of an American summer for teens, the summer job is not the mainstay it used to be.

"Everybody's just busier," Egdorf said.

The outdoor pool in Hospers is one of the oldest outdoor pools in the region and draws guests from many other communities. It opened Saturday, May 27, one of the first to open in the region.

Along with general busyness among young people, pools face a competitive labor market. One way pools across the region have dealt with the lifeguard shortage is by raising wages.

Last December, the Sioux Center City Council approved increasing youth admission rates at Siouxnami Waterpark by $2. That extra revenue will go toward increasing lifeguard salaries $1 this summer and $2 next summer to encourage employee retention and to stay competitive with neighboring communities.

The Sibley Outdoor Aquatic Center, which underwent its third renovation five years ago, also has raised wages over the years to stay competitive with other pools in the region, and it has introduced a variety of additional incentives, including a free swimsuit and T-shirt and reimbursement for necessary training.

"This season we will be incorporating a 25-cent raise per 100 hours," said Sibley Parks and Recreation director Sara Berndgen. "We also try to make it a fun environment to work in by adding different activities throughout the season for our lifeguards."

She aims to hire 25 lifeguards each season.

At the Rock Valley pool, wages have gone up substantially in recent years, and this season, lifeguards start at $13 an hour. If they earn their Water Safety Instruction certification, which permits them to teach swimming lessons, their pay jumps up $3 to an hourly wage of $16.

"We also did a $200 sign-on bonus, so new lifeguards that are employed by the city get $100 to begin the season, and if they finish it out, they get the other $100 then," Van't Hul said.

Recruiting lifeguards for the summer season is a "yearlong" endeavor, according to Sioux Center's All Seasons Center director Dave Egdorf.

Last season in Hospers, the city raised its wages for lifeguards to $9.25, but the facility has continued to struggle with staffing. This year, it raised its rates another $1.75, to an hourly rate of $11.

"This was the first year we were actually like, ‘If we don't get more guards, it's not going to be feasible," Jungers said. "We were considering doing limited hours. So, it might be a couple of days a week where you’re not open because, yeah, these guards still have lives."

Last year, the Hospers pool had 13 lifeguards on staff, but until the last few weeks, the pool had only six willing lifeguards on its roster heading into summer.

Fortunately, the pool made three more hires just under the wire, and the facility will go into the season with a staff of nine.

Even with nine guards, however, there already are open slots in the schedule, and the pool may be closed — or select amenities may be closed — here and there due to short staffing.

"If we close the slide, that eliminates the need for one lifeguard," Jungers said. "And June 3, we already know we don't have enough guards that day. So, we just have it on our Facebook page that we’re closed that day. We’ll probably see that a little more than we have in the past, but hopefully, it’ll all work out."

Jill Miller, who teaches lifeguard training courses at the All Seasons Center, goes into the schools to encourage students to consider applying to be a lifeguard.

"She's done it for a lot of years — she pushes hard for kids to come work for us," Egdorf said.

Staffing needs at Siouxnami Waterpark are higher than any other aquatic facility in N’West Iowa.

Northwestern College students and lifeguards Kate Van Der Werff and Akeyma Fedders prepare the computer system in the lifeguard shack at Orange City's outdoor pool, which opened on Memorial Day.

"We have 58 on staff," Egdorf said. "Between lifeguards, concessions, front desk, supervisors — and we have guards that are on break — with all of that, we need to have 22, 23 in rotation at a time."

When the Sioux Center City Council discussed admission rate increases to support wage increases for lifeguards this year, mayor Dave Krahling encouraged further increases if needed.

What it comes down to is this: Without lifeguards, there is no community swimming pool.

"I know there's this challenge of increasing expenses and payroll; I want to encourage you to increase rates somewhere even more, if needed," Krahling said. "This is not about revenue generation. This is about a community amenity. If we don't have lifeguards, we can't be open."

Van't Hul amps up recruiting efforts in December or January. Along with students’ busy schedules and competition from other jobs, she said another hurdle to recruiting lifeguards is the training required to become certified.

"It's a big commitment. It's a great summer job, but it's a big commitment," she said.

This year, Van't Hul, who is certified to teach the American Red Cross lifeguard training and certification program, was without a pool of her own, so she offered her regular course in March at the All Seasons Center, which also has an indoor pool. The All Seasons Center offered two additional lifeguard training courses, supplying its own instructors, in February and March.

The American Red Cross lifeguard training and certification program is available as a 28-hour in-person course or a hybrid course that requires 20 hours of instruction in person and seven hours online. Certified lifeguards must be 15 or older, and most area pools cover the cost of the course for the lifeguards they hire.

The shallow splash pool inside the All Seasons Center in Sioux Center slowly fills with water in advance of the summer season. The indoor facility is connected to the outdoor Siouxnami Waterpark, and both close each year for the month of May to prepare for summer.

"It's a great, entry-level job for them, where they get to interact with different members of the community, and they learn so many things," Van't Hul said. "I attribute some of my teaching and classroom management skills to teaching swimming lessons. If you can handle kids in the swimming pool, you can teach them anywhere. We’ve actually had a lot of teachers that have worked at the Rock Valley pool, and then they become teachers."

Along with regular lifeguard training courses, for two weeks each summer, Miller offers a Red Cross Junior Lifeguarding program at the All Seasons Center. The program is open to kids ages 7-14, and it's an effort to reach kids early and hopefully cultivate an interest in guarding in the future.

"They learn CPR, and they learn all the saves, and they get in the water," Egdorf said. "We’re trying to get them early, trying to build them up."

With all the preseason activity taking place at N’West Iowa outdoor pools this week, pool staff have been busy. However, the payoff comes when the empty pools begin to fill with water, a sign of splashing summer scenes to come.

That process involves thousands upon thousands of gallons of water, and for many pools across the region, filling takes days, even weeks.

The largest pool at Siouxnami Waterpark in Sioux Center is the first to be filled each spring.

"The deep pool takes about 24 to 27 hours to fill — and we just finished that on Saturday," said All Seasons Center director Dave Egdorf. "And the lazy river we filled on Saturday as well."

At the Orange City Swimming Pool, which includes a large, zero-entry pool, splash pad and slide with plunge pool, parks and recreation director Noah Minnick rolls out the filling process gradually.

"We want to take it a little slower, just so we don't cause any issues with water supply," Minnick said. "In Orange City, we always kind of have the Tulip Festival as a marker, like, ‘OK, our main pool needs to be up and filtering by festival.’ That's kind of what we look for."

At the Sibley Outdoor Aquatic Center, the pool is filled in early May.

"Our pool takes 40 hours to fill, with 120 gallons per minute. It takes a couple of weeks to balance the pool chemistry and up to a week for the water to get up to temp, depending on weather conditions," said Sibley Parks and Recreation director Sara Berndgen.

In Rock Valley, which went without a public pool last year while the new one was being constructed, the filling of the pool will serve as an especially hopeful sign.

"It's really exciting," said pool manager Alyssa Van't Hull. "It was a tough summer for some people last summer not having a pool."

SUTHERLAND—The historic building that houses the Willoway Complex in Sutherland is a hub of community activity in the town of around 600 resid…

We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on!

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos.

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular commented articles.