Facility Highlights
- The club’s one indoor pool increased its attendance 130 percent in the past five years.
- The facility has also increased the amount of swimming lessons, water aerobics and lifesaving training courses by 10 times. It has added three swim teams, water therapy, synchronized swimming, water polo and adaptive aquatics.
- Voted No. 1 aquatics facility in Delaware and No.1 Boys & Girls Club aquatics facility in the United States.
- Extensive adaptive aquatics program includes training for two Special Olympics groups, sponsoring the Delaware MS Society and numerous community outreach programs.
It’s Fun Friday at the Boys & Girls Club in Greater Newark, Del., where kids and kids at heart are taking their first stab at water polo and water hockey, or even scuba diving. Others are learning about pool management should they one day grow up to run the club.
It’s a regular community melting pot.
But for a long time it wasn’t that way. A lot of folks thought the Boys & Girls Club was only an outlet for underprivileged children.
To change that perception, staff recruited businesses and corporations to fund advertising and representation throughout the neighborhood.
It worked — like gangbusters.
In five years, attendance at the indoor pool increased nearly ninefold. The facility now offers about 10 times the amount of swimming lessons, water aerobics and lifesaving training courses; plus three swim teams, water therapy, synchronized swimming, water polo and adaptive aquatics.
With so much to offer, it’s almost a disadvantage for anyone in the community not to take advantage.