Balancing act: when it comes to a facility's long-term viability, balancing leisure with competition is key. A new study shows why.

As designers, whenever we are engaged by a community that wants to build a new aquatics center, we usually face the same dilemma: How do we meet the needs of the entire community when one special interest group, such as competitive swimmers, wants to push its agenda to the exclusion of all other programs? If public input is a part of the planning process, it's easy for one group or another to "pack the meeting" with a group of vocal supporters, and the rest of the community's aquatics programming needs get ignored.

It goes without saying that high cost recovery is vital to the long-term viability of any facility, and the aquatics community has generally agreed for the past decade that leisure pool components help strengthen the financial bottom line. Given this information, how can staff and design team members objectively illustrate this point? For many years, the only way was through qualitative evidence. No one could point to an actual study to document which types of aquatics programs produced the highest (and lowest) cost recovery.

But now we can. And so can you.

Our firm, Aquatic Design Group, recently surveyed 24 facilities throughout the Western states to determine which combinations of aquatics programs were the most financially successful. The results are in, and though they were largely what we expected, there were a few surprises. What's more, the information serves as a valuable tool for operators needing to explain why leisure pools often make more sense for a community. Here are the different types of aquatics facilities that were studied:

* Competition Only--Indoor

* Competition Only--Outdoor

* Competition and Recreation--Indoor