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Date: 6/18/2021
HOLYOKE – After a years-long process to rebuild its municipal pool, the city of Holyoke will soon reopen a newly built aquatics facility in time for summer.
Holyoke Parks and Recreation Direction Teresa Shepard said the Pouliot Pool at 575 Maple St. was the last municipal aquatics facility left in the city when the decision was made to close the pool. “At that point there were no municipal facilities left. The city used to have six sites and one by one they all closed,” she said.
Shepard said the sole municipal pool was closed in 2015. She said the city had initially planned to make repairs to the pool, but had realized that constructing a new pool would be more cost effective.
“We had to close it for repairs to be made and knew that we would be building a new one,” she said. “There were too many repairs -- it was too expensive.”
The city, she explained, was awarded the money to rebuild the pool in 2018. From there she said they began the next steps, which consisted of “design and a lot of the prep work that went into that.”
After the pool closed, Shepard said the department used Holyoke High School to continue offering aquatics programming. “When we did close the pool though, the following four or five summers we used the Holyoke High School to offer some water-based recreation,” she said.
Additionally, she said the pool was opened for community use during the afternoons. “We opened it afternoons, Monday through Fridays and developed a fairly decent clientele.”
Shepard said construction of the pool was completed and it was ready to be opened in the summer of 2020, however due to restrictions around the coronavirus pandemic they postponed the opening. “It will be open this summer,” she said.
She told Reminder Publishing during the week of June 14 that final preparations such as filling the pool and testing equipment were in the process of being done to ensure it could be opened to the public the week of June 28.
Shepard described the outdoor pool as “beautiful” and said they would be hosting senior swims from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Monday to Friday. Open swim would be hosted at the pool from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and on weekends family swim would be hosted from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. She said they were “going to try to do a senior swim on weekends from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m.”
Shepard said moving forward this summer they would not be hosting an aquatics based programming through the recreation department. “I think for this summer we’re going to reopen and get accustomed. Next summer we’ll be offering swimming lessons,” she said.
For a season pass to the pool, senior Holyoke residents and children in the city that are 12-years-old or younger will be charged $5 per person. Children 13-years-old and older as well as non-Holyoke residents will be charged $10 per person for season passes. Children under the age of three will not be charged to use the pool and day passes will cost $5. Shepard said while she was unsure of the exact date the pool would close for the summer, it would “definitely be before school starts” in the fall of 2021 as they tend to “lose a lot of our life guards.”
The Parks and Recreation Department will host two days at the pool where those interested in purchasing season passes can do so. The first date is June 23 from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. and the second is June 24 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. For other information about the pool, people are asked to call the department at 322-5620 or visit their website at https://www.holyoke.org/departments/parks-recreation/.