By Wendy Rudman
Ten years ago in January, four swimming enthusiasts sat around a kitchen table in Fort Walton Beach brainstorming on how to bring community pools and competitive swimming opportunities back to the area. The last publicly accessible pools had shut down overnight in October of 2014, leaving swim teams, children, lap swimmers, and aquacisers without places to learn or practice.
The foursome – Kathi and Gary Heapy and Pam and Bruce Braseth – were all deeply involved in the swimming community, coaching numerous teams for children of all ages. The closures of the Emerald Coast YMCA in Fort Walton Beach and the Destin Aquatic Center in Destin were a deep personal loss for them, as well as an immeasurable impact on the community.
Middle school swim season had been set to start in two weeks when the pool closed overnight in October. The sport was shifted to the spring, but even then, students were being bussed to the nearest indoor pool in Pensacola to compete.
The foursome decided something had to be done.
“We’re not getting any support for the reopening of these pools and they are sitting there,” Kathi said of the time leading up to that kitchen table session. “Vacant, empty, and deteriorating.
“At one point the city started talking about demolishing the facility (in FWB),” she added. “They were getting bids.”
That night, they all agreed. It was time to form a nonprofit, Emerald Coast Fitness Foundation, to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, and find ways to bring pools back to Okaloosa County.
The Fort Walton Beach pool – now called the Bernie R. LeFebvre Aquatic Center – was the first to reopen, thanks to cooperation from the City of Fort Walton Beach, the leadership of Liza Jackson Preparatory School, and a deep dive into serious fundraising. It opened less than a year later in December of 2015 and the renovated indoor pool serves thousands of swimmers each year.
The Destin facility took a bit longer. The year after the Bernie was opened, the founders learned that the Mattie Kelly Arts Foundation was entertaining the possibility of leasing the two-pool facility to the Emerald Coast Wildlife Refuge for rehabilitating marine life.
There were many obstacles, including the fact that the City of Destin and the Mattie Kelly Arts Foundation had both invested in the YMCA’s Destin facility and lawsuits were pending. In late 2016, after those matters were settled in bankruptcy court, Pam and Kathi forged on to convince the MKA and the city to support their efforts to bring a pool back to Destin.
In January, 2017, an agreement was signed and once again crews of volunteers got to work.
“It was all those ugly colors,” Pam recalled. “It looked like it belonged in a circus. We wanted it to be a place that people felt comfortable coming to and happy when they got there.”
Eight months later, the Destin facility – now known as the Taj Renee Community Aquatic Center – opened.
Facility Manager Jackie White, who volunteered 20 hours a week during the rehabilitation phase, remembers the day well.
“It was Aug. 15, 2017, at 2:15 p.m.,” White said. “I made a note to always mark that day in my head.”
Today, the Taj serves as a hub for competitive swimming, hosting 20 meets a year for high school and middle school teams, as well as summer league and year-round teams like Coast Aquatics. Collegiate teams from across the southeast train there over winter break and the Panhandle Pirates Water Polo Club practices there twice a week. Lap swim and deep water aquacise are offered year-round.
From October through April, the eight-lane competition pool, which is heated during the winter and chilled during the summer, is the center of activity. A family pool opens late in the spring for aquacise, swim lessons, pool parties and family play time, closing each season with the Destin Doggie Swim Day.
“People who didn’t know Pam and me when we started this whole process thought we were crazy,” Kathi said. “The people that knew us, and they knew us because we had coached their kids, they believed we could do it.
“And we did it.”
Views: 2
