Prefab pools becoming competitive.(Newsroom)(prefabricated aboveground pools)

Berkeley Aquatic Club's owner and head coach, Jim Wood, is excited. This fall, his New Jersey athletic club will start constructing an indoor facility around one of the two 50-meter pools used in this summer's U.S. Olympic team trials. The first step, however, will be transporting the pools nearly 2,800 miles from the Southern California trials.

Wood is taking advantage of a growing segment of the U.S. aquatics market: the use of prefabricated, aboveground pools, which can be easily assembled and dismantled, as permanent competitive facilities.

"We're not going to excavate at all," said Wood, who first saw the use of package pools in competitive swimming at the World Swimming Championships in Barcelona, Spain, last year. "We're going to have a large concrete slab that we're putting the pool on. Basically, you will enter the facility on the second floor of the building and that will be the deck level, so you won't know that it's an aboveground pool."

Getting the pool secondhand provided the club with significant savings, but Wood said there are a number of other benefits.

"The main advantage to us was to get a high-quality pool at nearly half the cost," he noted. "But also, if we need to repipe or address problems in the framework, everything's exposed. If the pool or any parts need to be replaced, it's easier. And if we decide to relocate to another site, the pool comes with us, and what we've got left is just a large warehouse. So it gives us a lot of flexibility."

Advantages such as these have sparked growth in this niche market and manufacturers are seeing the results.

Myrtha Pools USA, the company that engineered the two Olympic trial pools, estimates it will have 50 similar permanent installations in the United States this year, up from 35 last year.