From Failing to Fabulous: How Orem Family Fitness Got its Pool
Deck Back Fast
By Myles Phelps, Landmark Aquatic
Orem Family Fitness Center is an impressive municipal facility located in the beautiful Orem, Utah. Originally built in 1979, the facility underwent an extensive renovation in 2021 that expanded it to over 130,000 square feet. Today it draws roughly 3,000 visitors a day offering everything from basketball courts and rock climbing to pickleball, racquetball and multiple swimming pools. At the heart of it all is a 50-meter indoor lap pool which is enjoyed year-round.
When the poured-in-place rubber flooring surrounding installed around the beloved 50-meter indoor pool started deteriorating less than a year after it had been installed, the facility management and patrons were devastated. “We had been told the pour-in-place rubber deck would last 10 years, but within 9 months we were seeing significant wear and tear, it was literally crumbling under our feet,” explained Mariah Shirley, Facility Manager at Orem Family Fitness. “The floor situation was getting worse every day and we needed a guaranteed solution quickly, something very different that was a long-term solution.”
A Deck in Decline
The poured-in-place rubber flooring originally installed around the lap pool had been a reasonable choice at the time—a material once considered the gold standard for wet deck safety and comfort on swimmer’s feet. “Once I saw the situation, it was clear we needed to provide a solution quickly as the floor was crumbling everywhere and in many places the deck had exposed concrete,” says Holden Bigler-Johnson, Regional Account Executive for Life Floor, the product ultimately used as the replacement surface. “The crumbling floor that was not only an eye-sore, but was also frustrating to patrons and maintenance staff, not to mention a potential safety liability for the facility,” noted Shirley.
The maintenance team at Orem Family Fitness had been living with the consequences: rubber pellets clogging pool filters, debris accumulating in the water, and trip hazards forming across the pool surround. “Our normal cleaning procedures didn’t work because pieces of the floor would tear away, it was frustrating to maintain the failing floor and keep it looking good and keep patrons and maintenance happy—a losing battle around every corner,” explained Shirley. The deck had to go. The question was how to replace it quickly.
The contrast with the rest of the facility was striking. While the gym spaces, courts, and common areas gleamed after the 2021 renovation, the pool deck looked as if it belonged to a different building entirely — and posed real safety and hygiene concerns.
The Obstacle: Navigating the Municipal Bid Process
While Shirley and her team recognized the urgency of the situation, significant capital expenditures typically required a competitive bid process — a procedure that can stretch six months or more. “Our recreational center is unique in that it is self-funded. Not a general fund nor covered by city taxes,” explains Shirley. The timeline of the bid process was simply incompatible with the condition of the deck and the daily demands of the pool.
Shirley had crossed paths with Holden Bigler-Johnson at a National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) conference and reached out to explore whether Life Floor could offer an expedited path forward. Life Floor quickly brought Landmark Aquatic into the conversation — a natural fit, given Landmark’s deep experience in aquatic construction and its direct involvement in the original pool build at Orem Family Fitness years earlier.
During that initial joint discovery call, the team quickly identified the bid process as the central obstacle. That was when Landmark Aquatic raised an option Shirley hadn’t considered.
The Solution: A Purchasing Cooperative That Changed Everything
Landmark Aquatic has a partnership with Life Floor and is also an approved vendor through BuyBoard, a national governmental purchasing cooperative. BuyBoard works by pre-vetting and pre-qualifying contractors through a competitive process held every three years — and because that vetting satisfies public bid requirements, member agencies can purchase directly from approved vendors without going through a separate bid process of their own.
“Bringing the BuyBoard co-op platform to the conversation changed everything,” says Bigler-Johnson. “It turned out the City of Orem was already registered with BuyBoard. And since Landmark Aquatic is an approved vendor and partner with Life Floor, the bid process was satisfied — which meant the order could be placed immediately.”
The City of Orem’s procurement department was already using BuyBoard for other municipal purchases — park supplies, school materials, and more. It was the aquatics team that simply hadn’t known the option existed for this type of project. Once the connection was made, purchasing moved quickly and smoothly.
This dynamic — where a city’s procurement office is already enrolled in a co-op but the facilities or aquatics department is unaware — is more common than most people realize. BuyBoard now counts more than 5,000 member cities, schools, and governmental entities across all 50 states, with tens of billions of dollars in purchasing flowing through the platform.
The Installation: Ten Days to a New Deck
Once the purchase order was in place, installation moved quickly. Tyson Richardet, installer for Landmark Aquatic, led the crew through a ten-day process from demo to completion.
The first step was removing the old rubber flooring entirely, then grinding the concrete substrate down to a clean, level surface. “We had to cut and remove all the rubber, then grind the concrete,” says Richardet. A lucky dimension match sped things along: the original rubber decking was 3/8″ thick — identical to Life Floor tile. “It was a perfect match for a faster installation,” he adds. With matching thicknesses, no transition strips or substrate build-up were required between sections.
Life Floor tiles are installed using contact cement applied to both the substrate and the back of the tile, then pressed together before fully curing. Richardet’s team worked in sections of roughly 25 to 30 square feet at a time to maintain a consistent wet edge, finishing each section with a 150-pound steel roller.
Life Floor tiles are installed using contact cement applied to both the substrate and the back of the tile, then pressed together before fully curing. Richardet’s team worked in sections of roughly 25 to 30 square feet at a time to maintain a consistent wet edge. A 150-pound steel roller was used to finish each section.
A few details elevated the finished result. Richardet’s team raised the deck drains to sit flush with the new surface — eliminating the deep offsets that create both trip hazards and cleaning challenges. They also wrapped Life Floor material around the hot tub situated on the pool deck, including the steps, using a layered tile technique to achieve clean, flush transitions.
“It’s an extra touch that makes the surface safer and easier to maintain,” Richardet explains. “Everything flush, everything clean.”
Shirley explains that the raised hot tub on the pool deck is integral to the pool space. “The hot tub is raised off the pool deck—so the people in the hot tub can see the pool itself creating a community space,” says Shirley. “We have a large senior population who use that pool for their daily exercise and who also use that hot tub, so they need the steps going into the hot tub to be slip-resistant for a safe entry and exit,” she says. “It was amazing that Life Floor was able to wrap those steps, making it a seamless transition from floor to stairs to hot tub.”
When it was done, the project totaled 6,288 square feet of new Life Floor surface around the indoor lap pool. The maintenance team — who had spent years fighting rubber pellets in the filters and debris on the pool floor — were, according to Richardet, visibly relieved.
The New Pool Deck
“Everyone is thrilled with the new floor as it has completely transformed the pool area,” says Shirley. “We wanted the area to be bright and welcoming and beautiful, and the Life Floor did just that,” says Shirley. “The pool itself is almost 50 years old and the building around it isn’t as bright and shiny as it used to be, so having a bright flooring that makes the space look amazing gives the entire area a facelift and it shows that we are investing in our space in a way that our patrons and citizens can see that we care about creating an intentional, welcoming space for everyone.”
Full Circle — and Back in Business
There’s a detail about this project that the team at Landmark Aquatic finds quietly satisfying: the original swimming pools at Orem Family Fitness were built by CEM Aquatics — a company that was later acquired by Landmark Aquatic. In other words, the same lineage of aquatic expertise that helped build the facility decades ago was now the team called in to restore it.
That continuity matters — but so does the broader lesson this project illustrates. A failing pool deck that might have languished for another six months in a procurement queue was addressed in ten days of active installation, thanks to an often-overlooked purchasing tool that already existed in the city’s own vendor network. No bidding delays. No bureaucratic standstill. Just a fast, clean fix to one of the facility’s most important spaces.
For facility managers navigating the intersection of aging infrastructure, public procurement rules, and impatient patrons, that combination — the right product, the right installer, and the right purchasing pathway — is worth knowing about. The next pool deck that needs saving might be a single phone call away from a much shorter timeline than expected.
