Hosting roughly 300 people on a typical summer day and up to 1,000 during heat snaps, Needham’s Rosemary pools are well-used.
“This is not your typical municipal pool,” said Park and Recreation director Stacey Mulroy. “I don’t think there is one like this in Massachusetts.”
“We’ve got family areas, [a] walking lane, lap swimming, splash pool, the slides,” said Nancy Sterling, co-president for Needham Community Action Network (a strong advocate for the new pools).
The current pools opened in the summer of 2019, after a multiyear, multimillion dollar process shaped by community feedback. The facility features a competition-size lap pool and a separate recreation pool. The pools’ size and design, however, have made running them a challenge as the town has struggled to keep them staffed.
This year, said Mulroy, the Rosemary pools have been heavily criticized — “the worst [year] by far.” Most of these complaints are tied to pool hours.
Rosemary pools require a minimum of 18 lifeguards on duty at all times, with frequent rotations so that no guard is up for longer than one hour at a time. Two slides instead of one complicate pool operations, requiring two extra lifeguards to staff the top and bottom of the slides. The strip of pool next to the slides, cut in an “L” shape, creates blind spots necessitating even more lifeguards.
“We have, through the course of a day, 36 different lifeguards here,” Mulroy said. “That’s a lot of different people. With about 45 on staff, that makes staffing and scheduling somewhat challenging. I understand, beginning of the season, people are very frustrated with us — but a lot of our kids are still in school. And a lot of our college kids take time after college to go on vacation, and then aren’t back until roughly the same time the high school kids are. So, it can be frustrating for us, but I can’t stop them.”
Mulroy added that the days of strict work schedules and commitment to an eight-hour workday are disappearing. “If you say, ‘Well, fine, then you can’t work,’ well then they’re like, ‘OK, I’ll go somewhere else.’ And then you have even less staff. So, you know, we try to piecemeal them in as much as we can.”
Staffing during the beginning and end of pool season is particularly tricky, Mulroy said, so the potential for long days and a longer season is complicated by the need for lifeguards.
She added that colleagues in nearby towns are closing waterfronts because of staffing difficulties.
Adam Cole, varsity coach for Needham High School’s swim and dive teams, understands pool users’ frustrations. “It closes at 6 o’clock on weekends,” he said. “And when it’s still sunlight until 8 o’clock, it would be, I think, completely reasonable for it to be a space where people could bring dinner in and hang out by the pool until dark on weekends.”
Lessons and lap swims take up morning hours, Cole added, meaning free swim is not open until the afternoon.
“Given that [the pools have] such a short season, you should have more hours open during the day, for families,” he said. “If you think about a family with younger kids or multiple kids, you want to take them out in the morning, you gotta deal with lap times and things like that.”
Cole noted the biggest design decision for Rosemary was also the most significant for Needham: Choosing to build an outdoor facility. Needham has no town-owned indoor pool.
Indoor pools and an indoor-outdoor pool were both considered for the Rosemary site, but rejected based on site limitations and cost of operations and staffing.
“Running an indoor pool is like running a big business,” Mulroy said. “Getting lifeguards for an indoor pool is even harder … I have personally worked at indoor pools, and it’s really difficult to staff them.”
Yet, Cole emphasized, the need for an indoor pool remains, particularly for Needham’s swim teams. Three lanes at the Charles River Y for a town of nearly 33,000 is, he said, forcing people with swim interest to go elsewhere.
“We have kids going to the Dedham Health and Athletic, we have kids going to Charles River Aquatics in Wellesley … all kinds of places — people are leaving the town for opportunities to swim,” he said. NHS swim teams train at Babson.
Despite the operational issues, both Cole and Mulroy believe Rosemary is an asset for Needham.
“It’s a wonderful resource,” Cole said. “It’s vastly improved over the previous pool, and in terms of, you know, the number of people who go ahead and use it.”
Mulroy said, “From my perspective, it over-delivers on the needs of the resident.”
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