Parker Recreation Center
Parker, Colo.
Many children have picked pumpkins in a patch, hunted Easter eggs at a local park, or visited Santa at a mall or festival. But how many have made those memories at the pool?
That was the inspiration for the core events in the Aquatics Events Series at Parker Recreation Center. Over the past year, the Parker Parks and Recreation Aquatics Division launched several new or improved events for families to create unique memories and traditions.
“We were able to provide a glimpse of normalcy during a period in history where ‘normal’ didn’t exist,” says Hannah Quaney, aquatics programming coordinator at the center.
Before these events, Quaney said, existing examples were few to none, so she had to start from scratch. “I only had one to two meetings with our marketing team to get word out to our community, and one to two meetings with my supervisor to ensure I was on the right path,” she explains.
She used the first event, Pumpkin Patch Splash 2019, as something of a template. Once it was over, she created a timeline and checklist on how to coordinate, program, and execute the event. Then she adjusted the template for other events. “My main meetings are with our marketing team to ensure we’re targeting proper audiences and that information was clear in registration,” she says.
She developed detailed descriptions of each event, with proper timelines and responsibilities outlined for volunteers and support staff ahead of each event.
The series consists of five events in 2021:
• Pumpkin Patch Splash: This sold out in 2020, even with COVID-19 restrictions and precautions in place. They added several sessions to keep within guidelines, and all of them filled.
• Egg Splash and Dash: Quaney’s team filled more than 2,000 Easter eggs with safe, pre-packaged goodies and placed them all over the pools. Some even had “golden tickets” for large gift baskets and other prizes. The three sessions sold out during pre-registration, and the Easter Bunny made a visit and took photos with families around the pool.
• H2O Spirit Week: This week-long extravaganza included free fun for guests and staff, and allowed staff to accrue points toward their end-of-season Lifeguard Olympics. Themed days included First Responder Day, Superhero Day, Tacky Tourist Day and Luau Day.
• H2O Glow Swim: To close the summer, the team employed thousands of LED rope and Christmas lights, hundreds of glow sticks, glowing glasses, hats, beach balls and a few lanterns to transform the pool deck into a luminescent aquatic shindig. Safety was a prime concern for this event, thus the pool and building lights were left on and all egress pathways were lit by worksite lanterns.
• Swim with Santa: The inaugural event will take place in December, providing the opportunity for community members to not only take photos with Santa in the pool, but to splash around with jolly old Saint Nick.