Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Swim club says leisure pool is essential to meet public demand
A PERTH swim club believes plans for a new complex in the city must contain a leisure pool to meet the needs of the community.
Eve Thomson, president of Perth City Swim Club, said the swimming provision in the area was already inadequate and feared a loss of water would see many struggle to access a pool.
Perth and Kinross Council had proposed combining the two current pools at Perth Leisure Pool into a single eight-lane facility.
Eve said: “There’s no way a single eight-lane pool and a small teaching pool will be adequate to provide lane swimming for the members of the public that want to swim – it’s already inadequate.
“If you remove the leisure pool, and all the people who come for fun swims, and add them to that same pool, it is just not going to be adequate for the volume of people who want to use the water.
“Those who don’t want to commit to joining a club and commit to the training and the hard work that we do, but want to continue their swimming, they’re going to find it hard to find somewhere.”
An investigation by the Tele backed up those concerns, finding that Perth had the least amount of leisure swimming availability in the cities across Tayside, Fife, Stirling and Inverness.
Plans for a new facility are set to come forward in August after the previous proposal, which did not include an ice rink, leisure pool or indoor bowls, was rejected by councillors.
Perth City Swim Club currently trains aspiring swimmers from the age of six to 22.
Olympic silver medalist Stephen Milne came through the ranks ahead of his podium finish at the 2016 games in Rio.
But coach Ann Dickson said the lack of water availability in Perth, even with the leisure pool, meant they cannot grow.
She said:“We are probably one of the top ten age group swim teams in Scotland but we could be far higher than that.”