University of Calgary’s Aquatic Centre struggling with aging infrastructure and high demand, mirroring citywide pool challenges

By Nazeefa Ahmed, January 31 2025—

Sybille Melotte, 81, has been swimming at the University of Calgary’s Aquatic Centre for 55 years. She comes every day around 11 a.m. during public hours and swims in the slow interval lane to relieve muscle and nerve pain. 

“The pool is the only place I feel like a complete human being,” said Melotte. 

Melotte fell during an accident 10 years ago and became temporarily paralyzed. As a recreational swimmer, she pays for the seniors’ annual Active Living membership, ranging from $220.34-$331.50, to access the pool.

For the past two years, however, Melotte has found the pool to be more crowded than usual. While she is still able to get her laps in, the slow lane can often be taken by faster swimmers, which hinders her ability to swim comfortably. 

“Our half is very crowded,” said Melotte, who uses the pool when other rental groups book lanes. During these times, groups can book half the pool for $235 per hour while the other half remains open to students and the public.

Kaih Jones has been a lifeguard at the University of Calgary for the past two years and has noticed an uptick of swimmers during the Adult/Youth Lane Swim hours as well. 

“Early morning is pretty manageable [but] once we hit 11 a.m. it gets quite busy,” said Jones. “There are upwards of 40 people in the pool at that time and in the evening it gets even busier.”

Multiple stakeholders rely on the Aquatic Centre

The UCalgary Aquatic Centre is an 8-lane, 50-metre competition pool that can be split with a bulkhead and transformed into 16 lanes of 25 metres to maximize space. The pool is usually set up in the 16-lane format, with half being shallow and the other being deep. There are daily drop-in opportunities for students and the public, and a schedule is published approximately two weeks in advance.

The centre runs on student fees, public membership, lessons and the revenue from external bookings, rentals and programs. To sustain the pool and aging infrastructure, external bookings help to offset high operating costs, according to Albert Iamartino, director for Active Living and Outdoor Centre. 

“We’re going to have to continue to put in more money to keep it open and running for usage,” said Iamartino, adding that Active Living needed to replace the pool’s heat exchanger recently.

In addition to bookings, 1,404 public members — including staff, faculty, alumni, adults, seniors, and other Calgary residents — use Active Living facilities. These members pay for access to multiple amenities, such as the Fitness Centre, Climbing & Bouldering Wall and Racquet Centre. However, because one fee provides access to all facilities, not all members use the pool.

Iamartino said that students and the public are priority users. He has also noticed the increased demand for the Aquatic Centre, with up to eight swimmers per lane during peak hours.

“We want to ensure that they get the best times and opportunities to utilize all the facilities,” said Iamartino. “We’ve got a lot of demand [from outside], but unfortunately, we can’t provide that for the fact that we utilize every hour of our pool every day of every week, every month of every year.”

Cost and accessibility to students and the public

Students pay a campus recreation fee of $46.18 per semester, which grants access to Active Living facilities and programs such as Active Living Days, Active Incentive, and lifeguarding jobs. The monthly cost for students is significantly lower than that of other recreational facilities in the city.

However, the University of Calgary’s Ahead of Tomorrow plan aims to increase total enrollment by 10,000 and graduate enrollment by 7,000, which could lead to further strain on facilities. 

U of C PhD candidate Sankhi Polgolla has been using the pool for the past year and finds it accessible for students, with approximately two swimmers per lane, but crowded at times when outside programs book the space. 

“Once there were four people with me in a lane, and that was very difficult,” said Polgolla, who comes during the weekends, weekdays around noon and in the evenings, the latter of which she finds the most crowded.

While sharing lanes is an industry practice, there have been multiple reports of crowded lanes to the Gauntlet. 

When asked whether Active Living has a cap on accepting public memberships, Iamartino said that they don’t have one at the moment and that they monitor and adjust timings and programming depending on use. However, Active Living will adjust based on the growing student population. 

“If that does mean that more students are coming, we will open up more lanes and do less programming, but then that also means we have to balance costs and not increase the student campus recreation fee dramatically,” said Iamartino adding that he works with the Students’ Union (SU) and Graduate Student’s Association (GSA) to maintain affordability. 

Aging facilities and the women’s steam room 

Active Living recently upgraded the men’s and women’s change rooms, adding the now coinless lockers and uniform flooring. The Aquatic Centre recently replaced a heat exchanger for the swimming pools as well. 

However, public swimmer Grace Niewola has not been able to use the women’s steam room since December 2023, with the room being on and off in the months prior to that. Built in the 1960s, the women’s steam room had a “critical mechanical failure,” which required the unit to be fully replaced, according to a recent statement on the Active Living website. The steam unit was fully taken out of service in March 2024 due to malfunctioning electronic components that could not be repaired and is currently out of order. 

“People pay the membership, and the steam room is included in that,” said Niewola, who worked at the University of Calgary for 33 years and has been retired since 2014, using the swimming pool since then.

Niewola filed a written complaint in November 2024, to which she received a response that the steam room was being prioritized. 

“Some people enrolled in the university membership just to have access to the steam room and now it’s not working,” said Niewola. “It’s not only me, so many women are frustrated that it takes them so long to fix something.”

The parts have been bought, according to Iamartino, but they are waiting for new pieces to arrive. Additionally, the old infrastructure has made it difficult to fix quickly. 

“We have to completely retrofit the current system and then buy a completely new steam unit,” said Iamartino. “There has been a lot of work and subject matter expertise coming into kind of get that working.” 

Kinesiology Block A renovations are part of the unfunded capital project list, which would include the redevelopment of all recreational facilities, once funding is available. As of now, no renovations have been planned, but Iamartino says that the women’s steam room should be repaired within the next two months. 

Multiple pool closures in Calgary due to high repair costs

The past couple of years were met with multiple pool closures, from the city’s Beltline location to the Eau Claire YMCA. The Inglewood pool was supposed to shut down in December 2024, but councilors voted to keep it open due to the limited pools in the city. Three other city pools — the Bob Bahan, Sir Winston Churchill and Canyon Meadows — were also closed over the peak summer months for repairs. In addition to the Calgary pools, the Olympic Oval could face a shutdown if the facility does not secure funding, highlighting the city’s aging recreational facilities.   

“They’re past their life cycle,” said Iamartino when referring to the older Calgary pools and recreational facilities. “We’re in that same category, but we have the opportunity to continue to keep looking after it mechanically, and we do our due diligence to do that while also balancing user needs.”

The Vecova recreation centre beside the University of Calgary is the latest to shut down, with all pool programs coming to an end this June. 

“With this, our facility, built in 1969, has reached its best before date. The cost of renovating and modernizing the building is about 75 per cent of the cost of building a new facility, maintenance and repairs on our main building have become too costly, and the risk of a sudden shutdown is too high,” reads a statement on their website.  

Lifeguard Jones shares that the uptick of users in the Aquatic Centre could be caused by the Vecova shutdown.

“That would probably be why we have more people coming to the pools, especially with Vecova being down,” said Jones. 

U of C neuroscience student Justin Pho has been swimming at the Aquatic Centre pool for the past year. He prefers the Aquatic Centre over City of Calgary pools because he has more space here when he comes early.

“The city pools can be crowded at times, so I like coming here as early as I can to swim,” said Pho.  

The loss of public pools, combined with the rising demand, has made the University of Calgary pool difficult to access for some stakeholders. While the institution works to mitigate costs and sustain operations despite the strains of aging infrastructure and limited budgets through bookings, members have reservations about the quality of services provided.  

“I have never seen anything like it,” said Melotte. “They never sold the time of the public and students to the highest bidder.”

Iamartino shares his commitment to listening to members and ensuring that facilities are maintained.

“We’re very open to hearing feedback and getting suggestions on what could make our users experience better,” said Iamartino.

More information about the Aquatic Centre can be found on its website.