Family and Children Memberships
The Recreation Center has decided to continue to keep our membership age requirement at 16 years of age and up. We have always had limited space available to anyone under 16 years of age – only the leisure games, athletic outdoor courts and swimming pool seasonally. Also, a parent/guardian was required to be present with their children at all times.
With some changes in the Weight Room in the past few years, we no longer have a Leisure Gaming Area with four tables – two ping pong and two billiards. Instead, the one remaining ping pong table shares court space with the racquetball court, again limiting the space available for children even more. These moves came out of a need for more spacing and safety in our higher use areas.
As for the outdoor courts, the usage has dramatically increased since the pandemic began and we cannot accommodate all of our current member’s needs with most courts consistently booked in advance. We are always studying potential opportunities for additional facilities.
Lastly, we used to hire summer staff to teach swim lessons, perform pool maintenance and enforce pool member management. During the pandemic, our Child Development Center (CDC) was unfortunately closed permanently. We taught swim lessons in the past for the CDC that funded our summer programs and summer staffing needs. Without swim lessons and the additional summer staffing, it becomes a higher safety concern and liability issue to allow children to use the pool without the additional supervision. Also, the majority of our pool is dedicated for lap swimming. While we have not yet returned to indoor group programming (like group fitness classes) we anticipate to utilize the shallow/deep ends for adult aqua classes in the near future.
Although we would love to include families with young children again, we have weighed all our options currently and overall due to limited resources, feasibility and safety concerns, we will not be opening up to children under 16 years of age at this time. In the meantime, we do hope to host some family – friendly special events on our athletic fields/grounds areas in conjunction with our neighbors at UT Housing.
We will re-evaluate for Summer 2025!
