Many Kamloops parents were unable to register their kids for swimming lessons when the city opened up registration last week.
During the Dec. 13 council meeting, Councilor Katie Neustaeter mentioned the issue. “I understand that swimming lessons opened up this morning and were completely full within five minutes and maybe even less.”
City of Kamloops Aquatics Supervisor Andrew Smeaton wasn’t all that surprised with how fast spots filled up as there are a few factors at play.
“It’s the smallest set of swimming lessons going only from January until Spring Break in March. So it is always a challenge to get in at this time of year,” said Smeaton. “On top of that we have some compounding factors that are fitting in there too. We have a life guard shortage where we don’t have as many lifeguards as we typically would have this time of year. That has been a challenge that came out of the pandemic and we’re working to address that.”
“In addition to that, most people want their swimming lessons at very specific times. They want them in that after school period on weekdays and on weekends most people want them in the morning.”
“When we do have adequate staffing then the secondary problem that we run into is pool space because during those peak hours, all of the people want their lessons and we’re not able to provide more than five or six groups at a time just due to our pool space and availability.”
It might not be quite the same as an actual swimming lesson, but Smeaton says the city is trying to provide more chances for people to get in the pool. “We want to be able to give people opportunities to swim and so even though in this next period we’re not able to offer more swimming lessons, we don’t have the staffing capacity to do that right now, we have opened up more leisure swim times and more family swim times so people can come and get in the water and build up some confidence and maybe build up some swim skills on their own or with their family in a safe environment.”
Smeaton is hopeful that things will start improving on the staffing side. “We just had a posting close and we had the most amount of applicants we’ve had since 2019. So I think our applicants are on the rise. In addition we will have another lifeguard posting in early January to look for even more staff.”
“All of our staff that we have are both lifeguards and swim instructors. So for us, we are wanting to hire more lifeguards. If anyone is interested you can email swim@kamloops.ca. We can help you through the process of becoming a lifeguard or we can help with the process of applying if you’re interested in working for us.”
People can start looking at the spring and summer programming in March with the next registration date being March 14 for all of the spring and summer. “If you think of this winter period as being really short and we only had about 900 lesson spots available. When we get into the spring and summer, just because it is a longer period and we have Brock pool opening up and we’re hoping to fill more staff positions, so we’re hopeful we will able to offer at least three times as many lessons for the next period.”