The ever-so-busy Greensboro Aquatic Center in Greensboro, North Carolina will be constructing a second building that will house an L-shaped pool with five 50-meter lanes and 10 lanes adaptable to 25 meters or yards. The second building will be conjoined by a breezeway corridor to the already existing GAC.
The pool opened in 2011 and has hosted NCAA, YMCA and ACC championship events and numerous other USA Swimming club meets. The pool also hosts the Greensboro community and provides swim lessons, swim clubs, high schools, water polo leagues and water therapy. Coliseum managing director Matt Brown proposed the new fourth pool.
“We are literally at maximum occupancy,” Brown explained to News and Record. “You name the program, and we don’t have enough lane-line times available. Whether it’s a team practice, whether it’s a college meet, whether it’s local school swim teams, whether it’s therapeutic time, whether it’s a learn-to-swim program, there’s not enough time in the day to accommodate the usage now.”
The construction costs for the new pool is estimated at $7 million according to Brown.
“It meets our needs,” Brown said to News and Record’s Jeff Mills. “We want to keep our everyday programming going on while these economic-engine meets are coming to our community. We don’t want to sacrifice local users to have a national meet. We want to accomplish both.”
Greensboro mayor Nancy Vaughan has already given the go ahead on the project that is expected to open in January 2019. “We will have to sign off on the final bids that come in. But city council has already said this is a direction we want to move,” Vaughan said.
The addition of the fourth pool will likely attract more and more meets to Greensboro. During big meets like the NCAA, ACC and YMCA championships, the fourth pool may only be used as a practice area. But the championship meets are not the meets the city is worried about.
“It’s the other 85 percent of the meets, the other 50 events we do each year,” GAC manager Susan Braman commented to Mills. “We can easily still have public lanes and swimming lessons and teams practicing in (the addition) while those meets are going on.”
To learn more about the Greensboro Aquatic Center visit News and Record.
WORKD CLASS! CONGRATS TO EVERYONE, ESPECIALLY MATT AND SUSAN!
Great place for swimming!
Hopefully, they will do something about the locker room space! I was there in 2012 and had two small locker rooms! It is insane that the Philly region can’t build a facility like Greensboro!
Hey Tom: Facility opened in Fall of 2011, so you were there in first year. It’s undergone renovations since then to address issues discovered in that first year.
Seriously the greatest pool I’ve ever competed in! ?