Staffing Shortages Aren’t Going Away. It’s Time to Rethink How We Maintain Aquatic Facilities.
How the reality of staffing shortages is pushing aquatic facilities to shift the way they think about caring for their pools and pump rooms.
By Erica Peace, Landmark Aquatic
If you’re reading this, you just made it through the Fourth of July — the peak of the summer season and the busiest, most demanding stretch of the aquatics calendar. You’ve been putting out fires for weeks: covering shifts, juggling schedules, rebalancing chemistry between rushes, doing whatever it takes to keep patrons safe and happy. And if your facility is like most, you’ve felt the staffing shortage firsthand — not as an industry headline, but as the reason you were rotating your full-time staff through lifeguard chairs and testing pool water chemistry at 5 a.m. yourself.
So take a breath. Now, while the experience is fresh, is exactly the right time to step back and take an honest look at the reality you’ve been living — because it isn’t a fluke of this summer. It’s the new shape of our industry.
I know that reality well. Not long after I earned my Certified Pool Operator certification, I was handed the keys to a $4.3 million aquatic facility. An outdoor pool that was open six days a week, plus a leisure pool and two splash pads. Hundreds of visitors a day. And a full-time staff of exactly two people — myself included — responsible for hiring, training, and managing every lifeguard, swim instructor, and concession worker, running all the programming, booking the pool parties, and, somewhere in between, maintaining the water chemistry and the pump room equipment that kept the whole operation alive.
It felt crazy. It was also completely normal. Talk to aquatic facility managers across the country and you’ll hear the same story: limited full-time employees stretched across an entire facility, that often doesn’t have a dedicated maintenance professional on staff, because a seasonal pool can’t justify one in the budget. The manager — often a hardworking recent graduate who came up through lifeguarding — is left to figure out pool maintenance on top of everything else, with limited oversight and no real expertise in water chemistry or mechanical equipment.
For decades, this model held together because we could count on one thing: a deep summer labor pool of high school and college students home on break. That labor pool is shrinking, the forces shrinking it are structural, and they are not reversing. Which is why it’s time for facility managers — and the municipalities and school districts behind them — to fundamentally shift how aquatic facilities are maintained.
WHERE THE SHORTAGES COME FROM — AND WHY THEY’RE PERMANENT
Lifeguarding has lost its glamour. When I was a teenager, lifeguarding was the most glamorous summer job imaginable — get a tan, stay in shape, hang out with friends. That has changed, and phone culture is a big part of why. I’ve interviewed applicants who, upon learning they couldn’t have their phones on the lifeguard stand, told me they’d rather work the concession stand for two dollars less an hour just to keep their phones with them. No smart watches, no phones on the chair — for a growing share of young people, that’s a dealbreaker. Add the commitment of LG certification class, a week of real learning and physical training just to qualify, and fewer people are willing to sign up. The same is true on the maintenance side: CPO certification and equipment training take time and effort that seasonal workers rarely invest.
Wage competition has intensified — and it’s deceptive. We were paying $12 to $15 an hour when large corporate aquatic operators and other employers in our market started advertising $20 per hour. One summer, a major grocery chain in Texas raised its hourly rate and we watched our applications dry up. However, when those big employers advertise high wages, they often don’t mention they’re mass-hiring part-time staff and offering each person as few as ten hours a week. Inexperienced young workers chase the dollars-per-hour number without doing the math on actual take-home pay. As a result, young workers end up juggling two jobs and impossible schedules, and the traditional summer aquatic workforce gets pulled apart in the process.
Youth sports never stop anymore. Just because school is out for the summer no longer means kids are available. Club sports teams, tournaments, and high school programs now train year-round, and sports matter enormously to young people — socially and often because parents are pushing. We’ve hired great kids, gotten excited to have them, and then received their list of dates off: tournaments, training camps, travel. You look at the calendar and realize they’re unavailable for 70 percent of the summer.
And the season doesn’t shrink to match. In Galveston, for example, our pools ran from April through October 31. But 80 percent of the workforce goes back to school in August — while it’s still hot and the public still wants to swim. It’s genuinely hard to explain to the community that we have to make choices: close the leisure pool, keep only the lap pool open, and rotate the two full-time staff members through the lifeguard chairs ourselves. I conducted water testing at 5 a.m. and staggered full-timers across shifts. That’s a struggle — and it’s not unheard of for this kind of facility. It happens every year.
Any one of these pressures might ease temporarily. Unfortunately, these pressures together represent a lasting shift in the summer workforce. Facility managers who plan around “next year will be better” are planning around a workforce that isn’t coming back.
THE GAP YOU CAN’T COVER WITH HUSTLE: THE POOL ITSELF
Here’s the critical distinction every facility manager knows instinctively. When lifeguards call in sick, you pivot. When swim lessons need rescheduling, you pivot. Those are day-to-day problems with day-to-day solutions.
However, you cannot pivot on a failed 25-horsepower motor that weighs 200 pounds. Most facility managers don’t have the physical capability or the technical knowledge to pull and replace that motor — nor should they. It’s an expensive piece of equipment that demands an experienced professional, not someone attempting it for the first time. The same is true of water quality: pool water chemistry can’t be allowed to swing wildly, especially in the peak of the summer — with fluctuating bather loads and temperatures. However, chemical imbalances are exactly what crop up most. Equipment failure and water quality problems are the hardest issues to recover from, and they’re precisely the ones a stretched-thin staff is least equipped to handle.
This is where a third-party aquatic maintenance contract stops being a luxury, and is becoming the preferred choice and new operating model for more and more aquatic facilities.
WHAT OUTSOURCING ACTUALLY SOLVES
Consistency that survives turnover. Your seasonal staff will ebb and flow. You may lose a part-time tech who did a great job for three months and then left for higher pay — taking every bit of knowledge about your pump room with them. Fortunately, a third-party maintenance provider doesn’t leave. Reputable aquatic maintenance contractors send the same technicians year after year, building deep familiarity with your specific facility, especially under multi-year contracts. They become the institutional memory your staffing model can no longer retain — and they can train your next new hire or troubleshoot a problem over the phone with whoever is on-site when they can’t get there immediately.
One less ring in the circus. Aquatic managers wear every hat: HR, trainer, programmer, maintenance crew. A maintenance contract removes the most technical, highest-stakes hat entirely, freeing the manager to focus on programming, lifeguards, swim lessons, concessions, and rentals — everything that actually requires their presence during an incredibly busy season.
Budget predictability instead of procurement paralysis. Facility managers who’ve signed multi-year maintenance contracts tell us the same thing: it changes everything. The contractor comes monthly to check the entire pool and pump room, and when equipment goes down, repair work is already included. No scrambling for quotes, no waiting on approvals while the pool sits closed. The manager takes one contract to city council, once a year, at budget time — and short of a true catastrophe, everything is covered. When a chemical issue hits in July, it’s a phone call, not a procurement process.
Outsourcing pool maintenance just as buildings outsource HVAC systems. Municipalities never think twice about outsourcing HVAC maintenance. Nine times out of ten, there’s a HVAC contract in place for every building. While in-house staff might change an air filter, nobody expects them to climb onto the roof and replace capacitors on a commercial unit. That’s the HVAC maintenance contractor’s job, and no one thinks twice about it.
Yet those same municipalities almost never think about their aquatic facilities the same way — and the equipment in a pool pump room is every bit as complex, expensive, and consequential as the HVAC systems in their buildings. Arguably more so, because of what else is in that room.
The risk and liability conversation. The water and chemicals at an aquatic facility may be among the greatest liability exposures a municipality or school district carries. When risk management teams are brought into these conversations, we routinely find they didn’t know acid and liquid chlorine were being stored and handled on their property, they don’t understand how corrosive and oxidative those chemicals are, and they aren’t aware of damage that might be happening to the facility and its equipment. Once they understand what’s at stake — and what a professional contractor does to manage those chemicals, maintain that equipment, and prevent deterioration — the value of the contract becomes obvious. The hands-on facility manager, the person living the daily stress, is usually the one who raises the flag; the risk department is usually the one who can get it approved.
SHIFT THE MINDSET
A staffing shortage is not a bad year. It’s the new baseline. The seasonal workforce that aquatic facilities were built around has been permanently reshaped by wage competition, phone culture, and year-round youth sports — and no amount of creative scheduling will put a maintenance expert in your pump room.
Here’s what shouldn’t get lost in that reality: as long as these aquatic facilities exist, they will need to be maintained and invested in — every single year. I don’t think anyone would disagree. Our communities want these facilities. They love them. And they are upset when a pool goes down and the gates stay locked. These facilities are built with taxpayer money, through capital investments that take years to push through councils, boards, and bond measures. Having made that investment on behalf of a community, management has an obligation to keep making the investment that protects those aquatic facilities.
That’s the mindset shift that parks and rec departments, school districts, and municipalities need to make: capital investment in an aquatic facility doesn’t end at the ribbon-cutting. It continues for the life of the facility. And once you accept that, hiring a third-party contractor to maintain the pool becomes a no-brainer twice over — a short-term necessity to bridge staffing shortages that aren’t going away, and a long-term necessity to ensure the equipment and aquatic environment get the ongoing maintenance that keeps the facility from ever shutting down.
Municipalities and districts already accept that specialized building systems deserve specialized contractors. It’s time to extend that logic to the most complicated, most expensive, and most liability-laden system many of them own: the aquatic facility. A third-party maintenance contract relieves your overloaded staff, protects your community’s capital investment from catastrophic failure, and meaningfully reduces your risk exposure.
And remember: the back half of this season is still ahead of you — including that brutal stretch when school starts, your staff disappears, and the heat doesn’t. So is next year’s budget cycle. There is no better moment than right now, with the peak-season struggle fresh in your mind, to start the conversation with your director, your risk management team, and your council about getting a maintenance contract in place before you have to live through this again.
People don’t know what they don’t know — even when they care deeply. Partnering with experts who do know is not an admission of failure. It’s how well-run facilities will honor the investment their communities made in them — this summer, and for every summer to come.
