They'll take away my liberal card for this.

[rivka]

So, we did this thing. Which doesn't seem like the kind of thing we would do. We joined a "Swim and Tennis Club."

It's about a block and a half away from Alex's nursery school - a ten-minute walk from our house. The three and four year olds at school make use of the playground in any kind of half-decent weather, and in the summer they play in the pool twice a week and have swimming lessons. When she's four, she'll get tennis lessons too. Because the nursery school students make such extensive use of the club grounds, families of three- and four-year-old full-day students are required to join the club. The school covers our membership bond, and we pay annual dues. Which are expensive.

The mother of one of Alex's friends, who is a lawyer married to an architect, waxed enthusiastic about how the club is like a big family, and how pleasant it is on summer evenings when everyone brings their dinner to the pool and the adults socialize while the children play. This made me nervous. It made it sound more like joining a country club than paying a nursery school playground supplement. I don't really think of myself as the sort of person who would get along, or be accepted, in a country club setting.

The e-mails I got from the club in the lead-up to pool season - for example, suggesting that I sign up for a "tennis ladder," the rungs of which I could move up or down by challenging other members - didn't help. I developed a serious case of social anxiety about the damn Swim and Tennis Club.

"I think you're overthinking this," Michael said tactfully. It didn't help. But fortunately he turned out to be right.

We went for the first time on Monday. Once you're actually inside the intimidatingly high brick wall, it seems more like a normal kind of place that you might want to go. There's a decent-sized swimming pool, an extremely faded and downmarket cement-block building housing changing rooms, bathrooms, and showers, a bunch of lounge chairs, an outdoor poolside eating area, and a separately-fenced toddler pool. There are tennis courts, which I ignored. Then there's an open stretch of grass with a picnic area (complete with grills) at one end, a climbing structure for kids, and a sandbox. They have a swim team for kids 5 and up and offer swimming and tennis lessons. There's an ice machine, refrigerator, and microwave, instead of a bar or restaurant.

In a suburb, this would be a public park facility. There's nothing overtly country-clubby about it except, well, um, the membership dues, the membership bond, the tennis ladder, the annual crab feast, the fact that you can bring alcohol to your picnics, and the numerically restricted membership. We saw several of Alex's classmates' families and one family from our church.

I felt a bit better once I checked off two of the things on my secret checklist: African-Americans (some, but not a majority), and women as fat or fatter than me wearing bathing suits. I still feel kind of weird about being members there, though.


The main pool. The roped-off area has a two-foot depth. On the opposite corner is a diving pool.



The toddler pool. I appreciate the separate fence. There are loungers for parents and adorable tiny little child-sized deck chairs. As you can sort of tell from this picture, the toddler-poolside area is nicely shady.



The poolside dining area. The fridge and ice machine are to the side here - they're outdoors in a little covered alcove.



Playground area.



Picnic area by the playground structures. There are five or six single-family-sized charcoal grills. I saw some bigger covered things by the pool that look like large-group gas grills - they're probably for club parties. OMG. I belong to a "club" that has "parties."

Comments

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

When we lived in Idaho, we belonged to a Swim and Racquet Club - I think as an excuse for my mother to take us swimming Every. Single. Day. (That was back when she was a teacher and had summers off.) Mom and sister are both nutso about anything to do with water, so it made sense, I suppose. We definitely used our membership. And I think of my parents as pretty much total opposite of country-club-type.

I'm glad this place turned out less intimidating than you'd feared.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Apparently we almost grew up as country-club-types in Elmira. My parents were thinking of joining when they first moved to town. Then my mother made the fatal mistake of suggesting to our next-door neighbor that "we haven't decided yet whether to join the country club." The woman looked down her nose and said, "you don't decide about the country club, the country club decides about you." My mother was so disgusted they dropped the subject.

In retrospect, of course, what a hilarious thing to be pretentious about. It's not like the Elmira NY country club was a bastion of high society. It was a small town golf club.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

*ugh*

[lerryn.livejournal.com]

My brain did something odd reading that, and came up with a "Swing and Tennis Club" which would be rather peculiar.

[brooksmoses]

Swingsets for the kids, tennis for the adults? Sounds sensible to me.

What? Were you thinking something different? ;)

[redbird]

How about swingsets and tennis for all? I like swings, but most of them are made on the assumption that they're being used by kids or at most relatively thin teens, and aren't quite right for my broad butt (the old-style flat metal ones were better in this regard than the flexible plastic ones that everyone seems to have now). So I only played on the swings for a few minutes on Sunday.

[windsea.livejournal.com]

*chuckle*. I work and volunteer for the New Democratic Party of Nova Scotia. Social democrats 'r us. We're the Red Menace :-D.

And ... pssst ... for some years now we've belonged to the Waegwoltic Club, a swimming/tennis/sailing club very similar to what you're describing. I had many of the same reservations, but my poltical uneasiness was somewhat allayed when I realized that Alexa McDonough, former leader of both the provincial and Federal NDP, and currently our federal Member of Parliament, was a lifelong member, and one of her sons had his wedding reception at the club.

It's been a great place for the kids, a safe and controlled environment; for the past few years they've been able to go hang out there during the days when we've been at work. Kate's concentrated on swimming -- she's doing her Bronze Medallion this summer. Colin learned to sail a dinghy and do basic racing (though he eventually decided the *idea* of sailing was more appealing than the reality. Oh well. An awful lot of people sail in Halifax, it's by no means restricted to the rich, and it's a useful skill to have.) They've both messed around on the tennis courts, gone to the dances, hung out with friends.

The facility's in a *gorgeous* location on the side of the North West Arm, and the pools are saltwater. The clubhouse is a heritage building. And there are lots of middle-aged women who are no longer thin.

There's usually a rink in the winter, there's a decent and not horribly expensive dining room, a canteen and an ice cream window, and it's less than a thousand a year for the four of us.

I have decided I really like being a member. For every South End ladidah matron there are 10 women much like me :-D/

[aloha-moira.livejournal.com]

Aw, my aunt and uncle belonged to something like this when I was a kid and we went pretty much every day. It was great to have access to a pool in the summer, for sure. (I always wished I'd had diving lessons, but oh well.) Looks like a fairly welcoming place. :)

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

There's an equivalent swim club not far from us. Except that it has no playground equipment, and a full-service restaurant.

Oh, and it's totally cliquey. And hideously expensive.

So if you've got all the good stuff without the worst? Sounds great!

[kazoogrrl.livejournal.com]

This is in downtown Baltimore? Wow! Nice set up!

For public pools in the city I rather liked Riverside when practicing there for Fluid Movement. I like to get out of town when I can so I head up to Hereford and swim in the Gunpowder.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

This is in downtown Baltimore? Wow! Nice set up!

Yeah, it's right across the street from the National Guard Armory on Howard Street - on the southernmost tip of Bolton Hill. In the top picture you can juuuust see the tip of that old train station that's part of MICA now.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

That pool is very similar to the pool at Big Vanilla out here in Pasadena. We don't have tennis courts, but we do have racquetball courts.

[jenett]

We belonged to the Boat Club from when I was ..11? When we stopped going to Michigan for the summer.

It was a really good experience for me - swim team, sailing in turnabouts (which I was never serious about, but enjoyed, and my parents enjoyed to), and there was a lot of benefit for my parents in my teen years with knowing that if I was there, there was general teen-appropriate supervision, but I didn't have to be around them all the time. In the younger ages, the swimming lessons and swim team and such were great.

And as someone who doesn't like crowds of new people all the time, it was also a pretty stable community: gradual changes over the years, but not like going to a beach where I don't know anyone but the people I came with.

[ailbhe]

I love outdoor pools. Don't see many of 'em but love 'em. It looks like a place you can all have a great time.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

Not to be alarmist, but what's the drain cover on the toddler pool like? I'm thinking about the Minnesota girl that was injured when she sat on a pool drain.

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

We didn't get to actually look at it -- it was closed off because some miscreant hurled a box of mostly-eaten fried chicken over the wall so it landed in the toddler pool, and they had to drain & refill it, and adjust the chemical mix. I'll check it when we can get access to the pool, as that story really squicked me when I read about it, and I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

I didn't get a chance to comment much in person, but the club sound very much like our WCRA club (I am on the board as a non-voting member since I run the website).

My number one criteria for any social club - no social review for acceptance. Period. Anyone with the cash can join. Some places require living within a certain distance of the pool, which I don't take issue with. We don't even have that rule, though I am not sure why someone living far away would be a member -but it has happened.

See, I see these pools as a great community-run/neighborhood community building organization. Yours, as well as ours, is volunteer run by members - this means that no outside commercial interest is running the place.

In int'l development, a big mechanism for local grassroots development is capacity building of communities to run their own social/community institutions. This pool is exactly that sort of institution.

Sure, it can be cliquey, but frankly, from being on the "inside" in ours, I have found that it is more a case of "oh, we know Fred, he'll get the job done and not flake, not like Frank did that one time".

Oh, and our pool, being one of the largest community organizations in the area (500 memberships), gets a lot of attention from our local politicians, which I find interesting. Being involved in the pool, I feel pretty involved in land usage issues, insurance and legal requirements, and available children's activities (since the scouts are out, swimteam is pretty cool for my kids to be involved in).

And it is a great way to meet and know the neighbors - which of course is how communities get made.

My 2 cents.