New Dula Pool to ease city’s swimming crush

Denise Cardinal and Benjamin Grove

Monday, April 13, 1998 | 9:51 a.m.

Local swimmers, tired of crowded facilities and early-morning swim times, are waiting anxiously for the construction of a brand-new Dula Pool.

The $5.6 million pool, scheduled to be finished in September, is replacing the 50-year-old Dula Pool at Bonanza Road near Las Vegas Boulevard. The facility will house a covered Olympic-sized pool, bath house, workout area and classrooms. It's the most expensive -- and only -- pool built by the city in more than 30 years.

The pool itself will be in the shape of the letter C, with the longest middle section at 50 meters connected to two 25-meter-long sections. There also will be a 3-meter and two 1-meter diving boards.

Commonly referred to as muni pool, the Dula facility was built in 1947 and was the only enclosed pool in the valley north of Henderson.

The center was always full, according to city parks staff, since it was one of the few pools in the valley that could be used for competitive swimming year-round.

The past 20 years of its life, however, were plagued with broken pumps, leaks and hundreds of other maladies. It finally breathed its last breath in February 1997 when the city closed its doors rather than pay $500,000 for repairs.

"It was old," Barbara Darling, city parks manager, said. "It had really reached the end of its useful life."

The woes of the Dula Pool hit many area swimmers where it hurts. Since it was the only one of eight city pools that was covered and one of only a few that are heated, it was sorely missed.

UNLV head swim coach Jim Reitz said the lack of swimming pools in Clark County was "amazingly bad relative to the size of town we have.

"Unlike football or some other sports, swimming is something you can do even when you're 90, if you can get in a pool. How we got to this point of not enough pools has something to do with how the infrastructure was set up years ago in relation to our growth. I don't begin to say I understand it."

Reitz's wife, Nina, coaches a nationally competitive swim club called Las Vegas Gold. About 100 students ages 5 to 18 train and compete all year round. Teenage club members also compete for their high schools.

A lack of pool space forces the club to practice at UNLV at 5 a.m. part of the year and at the Trails Pool, an outdoor municipal pool in Summerlin, in the winter.

"It's pretty brutal training outdoors in the winter," Nina Reitz said. "When it's raining and the wind is blowing and it's 30 or 40 degrees it gets pretty cold."

Jim Reitz said he had about 50 men's and women's swim team members, few of whom come from Clark County.

"Because of the pool crunch, we just don't have the room for clubs to grow," he said.

There are only two existing city pools that aren't attached to a school. One is the Trails which was built by the Howard Hughes Corp. then sold to the city for $700,000 last year. The other is at the Doolittle Community Center in West Las Vegas and was built in 1964.

Two more pools will be built by the city and opened next year -- one at Durango Drive and Gowan Road and the other near Palo Verde High School at Alta Avenue and Husite Drive.

Until then, swimmers will have to use the remaining five of the city's pools, which only are opened part of the year. Most of them were built at what were high schools -- now middle schools -- in the 1970s and aren't heated.

But residents can only use the pools when school is out because changing rooms are part of the school.

Middle school and city pools can't even adequately service the 21 high school swim teams in the Las Vegas Valley. None of the district's high school have pools.

School board member Mary Beth Scow said building and maintaining swimming pools presented the district with a complicated problem.

"It's a tough situation," Scow said. "It's very expensive to build and maintain pools."

School board member Lois Tarkanian said plans to pursue more cooperation between the city and the district to build and better maintain pools were in limbo, as far as she knows.

"We were going to go with partnerships if we could," Tarkanian said.

Last June, the School Board said it wanted to form a partnership with the city to improve two of the school district's six pools, one east of Interstate 15 and one west.

But nothing happened.

Darling said the city is asking for the money to make improvements at the two middle schools in the next budget cycle. School Board President Susan Brager said she plans to find out what progress had been made.

"If we are going to have football and basketball and some of those other sports and fund those in a manner that helps the team, then we should do it with swimming," Brager said.

Lynda Spann, Clark County swimming coordinator, said she was frustrated none of the middle school pools had been renovated.

"We went to the School Board three years ago and asked for help," Spann said. "Then we went back last year and we were excited because we thought we were going to have something and nothing got done.

"It's at the point where I don't know what to say. If it weren't for the city, we wouldn't have a program."

Spann said Clark County had 700 students in swimming programs last year.

"There are more students in swimming than in any other sport and we can't get any support from the school district," she said. "Reno has more pools than we do."