A new committee has been formed to raise funds for a new city pool. The committee members are Shaud Shwarzbach, Diana LaBuda, Heather Pleninger, Melanie Shwarzbach, and Rich Jespersen. They made an announcement at the First Big Sandy Swim Meet.

Published here is the announcement.

“Welcome to the FIRST EVER BIG SANDY SWIM MEET! We would like to thank everyone that has come out today to support our Barracuda’s. This event is being put on to allow our swimmers the opportunity to have a swim meet this year since due to COVID19 many teams will not be able to host meets or even have a team. We would like to thank City Council for approving and supporting today’s event.”

“A few announcements before we get started. For several years now our current pool has been struggling with being able to stay open due to repairs that are desperately needed. The current pool is 70+ years old and has served our community well. Even though City Council and our Pool Manager Leslie Gregory and City workers; Tim LaBuda and Larry Geyer, have done an amazing job fixing, maintaining, and just simply caring enough to keep it going. The swim team knows that there will come a day when these wonderful people will just not be able to afford or have the ability to fix it due to its age. So, the Big Sandy Barracudas Swim Team would like to start fundraising to support a new pool to be built. They realize this may take a while – however it must start somewhere. The team has partnered with the city to try to make this happen. If you would like to donate, donations can be made thru the team or the city. We have a donation bucket at concessions. A “GoFundMe” page is being created where donations can also be able to be given. Please watch for further information.”

“Any questions you may have concerning donations for a new pool can be directed to Shaud Schwarzbach or Diana LaBuda.”

This will be discussed over and over again as the project goes forward. It was interesting to talk to a couple of men at the swim meet concerning the issue of a new pool. One voiced concern that if people don’t use the pool they don’t see a need. Another man, who had come into town just to see the swim meet, mentioned he didn’t realize how bad the pool was. He didn’t know the pool was that old and was impressed it was still working at all, but thought it was kind of embarrassing the town didn’t have a better pool. He was impressed we have so many kids working so hard with such a short length of pool to train in.