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Parks & Rec Business
| Looking Back After four years of its operation, travel back to the 107,000 square-foot Medina Community Recreation Center that we first profiled in our January 2003 issue, and find out what worked and what didn’t. By Rodney J. Auth It goes without saying, good planning leads to good results, and great planning leads to great results. But, no matter how effective, how thoughtful, how protracted, how creative the planning process, in the end, it’s impossible to anticipate exactly how a new recreation center (or any facility, for that matter) will be used, what its most popular programs will be and what its membership will total. As, the military folks say, it’s a highly fluid situation. Decisions are made then re-made. Compromises are struck then changed. Funding is given, changed, given again and so on. In the end, it’s up to the staff of the new recreation center to work through the inevitable, unintended consequences of trying to please so many different stakeholders in one facility – no matter how magnificent the building. The new 107,000 square-foot Medina Community Recreation Center, opened to the public in October 2002, is no exception. Unintended Consequences The new recreation center is attached to the newly renovated high school. It was designed to maximize the city’s construction dollars by taking the school district’s plan for an athletic complex (two basketball courts, a weight room and a competition pool), and expanding it to meet the needs of both high school athletics and the community at large. As Kurt Gehring, Recreation Supervisor for the Medina Community Recreation Center, says, “The city had tried numerous times to pass a stand-alone center with little success, so, when the school was going to build half of what they wanted, they decided to commit half the money and build the other half.” Conceptually and financially, it was (and is) a great idea. The city, which paid its half of the construction costs up front (debt service is $573,000 per year for 50 years), rents the building back from the school and pays 47.5 percent of utilities and custodial expenses (approximately $33,000 per month). In return, it gets 107,000 square feet of programming space, which is used to run over 600 programs (mandated to run at a 40 percent profit margin) for the 9,400 members (10,000 is considered sold-out). But, as with all new concepts, the logistics of working to meet the needs of two distinct audiences, high school users (athletics and phys ed classes) and paying members, has created organizational challenges that are still being worked out. As Doug Maxwell, Facility Manager for the recreation center, says, “It’s like having your in-laws living with you. There are times when we get along great, but there are times when three different groups want to use the same space at the same time, and somebody’s going to lose.” According to the original plan, the school and the city are both supposed to have a single designee in charge of any space request. “But, what it’s really become,” according to Gehring, “is a handful of people at the school calling a handful of people down here (at the recreation office in the new center) and making their own arrangements. So, to adapt, we’ve really had to condition ourselves to say, ‘Okay, I’ll get back to you and then go and talk to every other person who has a say in that space and make sure there’s not a conflict.’” Lessons Learned In addition to those types of scheduling challenges, the beautiful new facility offered up some unintended design challenges – things that were not horrible or toxic, but slightly annoying – small irritations you can live with, but wish weren’t there. Here’s a look at some of them: Aquatics The aquatics facility, run by Darlene Donkin, Aquatics Manager, features an eight-lane competition pool and a separate zero-depth entry pool offering a sprayground, slide, spa, current channel, and attached, fenced-in outdoor patio. Since the center is used in coordination with high school athletics, the competition pool features its own entrance, ticket booth, concession stand, and locker rooms, allowing the pool to be completely and securely closed off from the rest of the center during swim meets/competitions. It also allows the recreation center and the popular aquatics facilities to remain open for all its regularly scheduled hours – even if there is a swim meet. It’s a great win-win, but as with the space scheduling conflicts, the staff is still working to smooth out some wrinkles in the overall layout and design of the facility. According to Donkin, the two biggest things she would change in the aquatics center’s design are the bulkhead (wouldn’t buy it) and the channel current (would make it a stand-alone, if buy it at all). “The layout of the pool is great,” says Donkin, “but I’m not a fan of our current channel mainly because it creates a vortex right outside the channel entrance. Our current channel is located right where the zero-depth entry pool starts to get deep and, if you’re not a strong swimmer, the current actually pulls you into the channel. It’s very dangerous.” If she could do it again, Donkin probably wouldn’t include a current channel in the center. If it was something that was required by the public, she would at least make sure it was a stand-alone attraction separated from the pool and policed differently – similar to what most larger centers do with their lazy rivers. Donkin is even more adamant about the bulkhead, which allows her to set her pool at meters or yards. “In northeast Ohio, we really only swim at yards so we really don’t need the ability to reset our pool, it takes us too long to move it into place (45 minutes), and when we’re not using it, it permanently takes up five yards of my shallow end – precious space I could really use. So, no, I would never purchase one.” The obvious question (at least to me) was: Why does she keep it in the pool? “Because it’s impossible to remove. Once it’s in the pool, it’s there to stay.” As Gehring says, “We had to have the bulkhead delivered before the windows were installed. The only way to get it out is to remove the windows and rent a crane.” Despite all of this, when you tally up the pro’s and con’s of the aquatics portion of the center, all staff agree it’s an excellent facility and a true asset to the community. But nothing is perfect. That’s just life. Locker Rooms As all parks and recreation administrators can attest, there is no such thing as a perfect locker room design. And, in the case of Medina, this certainly rings true. One of the staff’s biggest concerns seems to be the size of the locker rooms and the fact that they don’t offer a direct entrance to the pool deck. According to Gerhing, the locker rooms are just too small. “We have 100 lockers in each room, which hasn’t been enough, and we don’t have enough showerheads. For instance, we only have four showerheads in our women’s shower. As it turns out, that has just been completely inadequate.” As Donkin says, “The school kids have the opportunity to come from their locker room (adjacent to the competition pool) directly to the pool deck, which has worked out great, but our patrons have to go out into the air-conditioned building to get to the pool, which isn’t so great – that hasn’t been popular.” Even the planning for the family locker rooms, a very popular attraction, could have been improved a bit. As it turns out, patrons love the family locker rooms, but they get frustrated when they store their gear in the locker room, as intended, but can’t get to it when they want because another family is changing. “In retrospect,” says Donkin, “it would have been better to put the lockers outside the changing room so everybody would have access, all the time.” Fitness Center Outfitted with a mix of Cybex, Precor and Woodway cardio equipment, and a host of Magnum free-weights, the 8,600 square-foot fitness center has been very popular. The space is used several times a day during the school year by high school physical education classes and sees constant traffic, even during the slow seasons. But, like the rest of the facility, the center only became the well-oiled machine it is today through a yearlong process of trial and error. What is the biggest challenge? All of the fitness equipment was purchased based on the size the fitness center was supposed to be. “But,” according to Gehring, “when the architects made a layout of the equipment, it didn’t fit how they had envisioned it and, once we finally put it where it would fit, the electric in the building wouldn’t support it. Eventually, we got everything rearranged (three times) and re-wired, and we’re just fine.” The center features big windows, which let in a lot of natural light, and high ceilings that give the user a sense of space in what is a relatively packed area, but the physical layout of the space continues to offer challenges. According to Gerhing, “The curvy glass block walls and funny angles make it really difficult to place equipment, and the addition of a staircase ate up about 1,800 square feet of free-weight space.” And, he would never again use carpet to cover the floor. It just doesn’t stand up to the constant pounding. Construction Issues Of course, unintended design issues are par for the course. No matter how well you plan, in the end you simply do your very best and recognize you’re still bound to run into some minor, troublesome headaches. Construction consequences are another reality all together. You can’t plan for them and you can’t, probably, avoid them. All you can really do is deal with them. The Medina staff waded through its share of construction-related issues, things like closing the track for eight weeks and the field house for six to replace the floors (bad batch of product), draining the pool and spraying a liner on it to stop it from leaking (1 million gallons lost to the outside dirt via pin-prick-sized holes in the concrete), and pacifying neighbors (whose basements were flooded when the installers tested the backwash procedures, only to find they had installed the wrong pressure regulator and swamped the city’s sewer system). In the end, if the folks at Medina learned anything, it’s that change is difficult, and building a multi-faceted, multi-user facility like a community recreation center definitely qualifies as change. It wasn’t always easy. It wasn’t always fun. But, it was always worth it. And will be… for at least the next 50 years. |
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