Aquatics centre to partially reopen next week

The doors have slowly been reopening over at Spray Lake Sawmills Family Sports Centre for over a month as the facility opens up, in a phased approach.

CEO of SLS Family Sports Centre, Blair Felesky says the reopening is going well. 

"We have a couple of arenas open currently. We've run some summer camps for kids that have been very, very successful and we've managed to keep the cohorts intact and we've executed upon that real well. I'm very pleased with all of that."

When we can take a dip into the pool is on a lot of Cochranite's minds. 

Felesky says "Our next stage is the aquatics centre. We are going to be opening the aquatics centre for members only just so we can do tracking and tracing on a daily basis. That happens Aug. 24."

As far as when the pool will be open for the general public who don't have a membership, there's no set date yet, but Felesky says they will start offering day passes again in the not too distant future. 

"That's still in the process, that'll be at another stage. They will still have access just with, for instance, a monthly membership and really the value of a monthly membership, they would just need to use the pool about four times in a month to justify that."

"I don't want to convey a message that we're not being inclusive with the community. I think we have enough membership options that will give comfort if they do want to become a member, use the facility for the time being. There's enough options that I think we can find a very good pathway for them, but the tracing and tracking for us is going to be very important."

He says "We are in the final stages of filling our lap and leisure pools and bringing those to temperature. We'll start filling the therapy pool. Then over the course of the next week we'll go through some reorientation and training and then water exercises with our aquatics team to get them prepared."

Felesky says the lap pool and the leisure pool will be open to lane swimming only, in 45 minute time blocks that members can book online.

He says they aren't able to open everything up in the aquatics centre just yet. 

"We're not going to be opening the hot tub or the water slides. We're just going to be following Alberta Heath guidelines and we'll assess that appropriately as time goes on but those two will not be open, at least in the near term."

The spray park opened its gates back on July 1 and Felesky says they're on track to break some records when it comes to how popular that's been. 

"We typically will put through about 8000 to 10,000 participants in the spray park annually during the summer and I can tell you, our trajectory right now is, we're going to be in excess of 25,000 by the end of the summer."

For more information about membership and the phased reopening plans go here.