November 2009 BBMAC Presidents Newsletter

Hello again everyone. Hard to believe that Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season is only a little over two weeks away. Time has really passed since the end of the summer. Now that the air has a bit of a chill, thoughts about swimming pools and aquatics activities may be far from the front of everyone’s mind. As your BBMAC Foundation President though, such thoughts are never far from my mind so I wanted to bring you up-to-date with what has been going on at BBMAC. To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of BBMAC’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Despite what you may have seen in a recent headline in a local newspaper, BBMAC has been up and running all through the fall, albeit in limited way. We still continue to provide a venue for teams and other groups who can pay for our costs associated with having them. This includes groups such as Coronado Aquatics Club, Performance Elite, Water Sports and Physical Therapy and DSST master swimming. Additionally Aquatics Director Carrie Fisher-Fernan has booked the facility thoroughly throughout the Holiday Season with many college swim teams. There have been cutbacks in service however, and the two main groups affected by that are the general public and all Coronado Unified School District programs except for home water polo games. The Aquatics Task Force appointed by the district continues its work to help the district and BBMAC find a path to sound fiscal future. Several volunteer members of the community have been donating their time and effort over the past two months looking at various areas of the operation. So many sets of fresh eyes looking at the issues have resulted in a few new ideas and the Task Force is busy analyzing them. Chief among the new ideas is one called The Cooperative Model concept with the City of Coronado Aquatics Center. This concept basically proposes that BBMAC and the City Pool coordinate services offered at each pool in order to maximize each facility’s strengths. By doing so, we would eliminate overlapping services and thus avoid direct competition. This will probably be one of many recommendations to come from the Task Force but this one in particular would have to be approved by both the CUSD governing board and the City Council. As I have stressed in previous newsletters, any new business plan will probably entail some level of fund raising and the BBMAC Foundation will still be responsible for that part of the plan. Your Foundation is still looking for volunteers in this particular area so if you are interested, please contact me or any other BBMAC board member to volunteer your time and talents to help us meet our fundraising goal, which is a critical pillar in the future viability of BBMAC. I wish you a wonderful and peaceful Holiday Season to you and your family and friends. All the Best, Joe Cook http://www.bbmac.org