What are the criteria for a pool to be listed on the Places2Swim.com website?
To be included on the Swimmers Guide website:There are several types of pool we will include, even if they don't meet our general requirements.
We include hotel swimming pools as short as 15 meters (49.2 feet). Although short pools aren't ideal for lap swimming, sometimes travelers, particularly business travelers, don't have time to get to a larger facility. We feel it's better to go for a swim in a convenient, short pool, than not to be able to swim at all.
We sometimes include other pools (at least 15-meters long) in areas where we have not been able to find facilities within a reasonable distance that meet the 18-meter minimum requirement.
In the past we have included other short pools dedicated to "learn to swim" programs and/or therapeutic aquatics programs. We included them because we felt it was better for non-swimmers or disabled/impaired pool users to be directed to facilities specifically designed for them, than to general-use pools. Unfortunately, we have concluded that the database has grown so much that the time spent keeping these listings up to date is not worth the effort; we are not adding new listings in these categories, and we are eliminating ones added earlier, one by one, as we progress though our regular reviews.
Similarly, in the past we have included "treadmill" or "swim-in-place" pools. Although they don't meet the technical length criterion, practically speaking you can swim further without turning in one of these puppies than you can in the longest of the pools listed that does meet the length requirement. Unfortunately, we find that these pools (and often the facilities that house them) are impermanent, as compared to other, larger pools. The clubs that house them shut down with a high degree of frequency. Maintenance is apparently also an issue. And they often require prior scheduling. These are no longer being added to the site and the ones that were listed are being deleted.
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Occasionally we may find a pool that's open for only six or seven months of the year, in an area that doesn't have very many pools. In those cases, we may include one that's open for less than eight full months. This happens most often in the Southern Hemisphere - particularly in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In those cases, we include a red-letter "Alert" at the top of the listing, in the map point preview, and in the List view table.
In Europe it is common for a community to have a swimming facility with both indoor and outdoor pools, neither of which is open for a full eight months, but one which is open when the other is closed, and swimming is possible for the required eight or more months. In those situations, we'll include the facility, usually with the indoor pool in the "lead" position, and the outdoor facility described in the "Notes" section.
Very rarely, we may find out about a pool that's so well-known and well-liked by the locals that we'll waive the minimum length requirement. When we make an exception to the rules for short pools or short-season pools, we include an "Alert" in the listing that appears after its name, wherever its name appears. (We don't always remember to do that; if you find a listing where we've forgotten to annotate a short-season operation, please use the "Suggest change" tool in the pool's listing to remind us, so we can correct the oversight.)
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We include school, college, and employer health facility swimming pools that do not accept the general public, either on a "drop-in" or membership basis if they have one or more resident aquatic sports teams and we have contact information for the team(s). Most teams will allow visiting members of other teams to join workouts for a few days on a guest basis, even if their training pool is not customarily open to anyone else. (In these cases, a listing will not have a telephone number but, instead, will refer users to see the websites of or contact information for the resident club(s), in the Teams section of the listing.) Note, however, that in the case of schools and colleges, the "resident" teams mentioned above exclude the institution's own interscholastic and intramural teams. Those do not, as a general rule, welcome strangers. We're not here to promote the teams, we're here to let swimmers know where they may be able to get in a workout.
Some pools that are highly restrictive in their admission policies are so well known that we may include them in spite of the restrictions, so swimmers will know not to bother even trying to get into them. (This saves us a lot of time answering email inquiries as to why a well-known facility isn't on the website.)
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As mentioned in the admission exceptions section, some of the facilities listed are included on the site only because they host local swim teams but are in school or college pools whose admission policies would otherwise exclude them from being listed. Where we believe that there's no chance of someone other than someone swimming with the local team getting into the pool, we do not include the facility's telephone information. Instead, we refer the user to the team information further down in the listing. We do this as a courtesy to the institutions that host the teams; they don't need to be bothered receiving calls from people they're not going to be able to help, anyway.
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We may exclude pools that meet the listing criteria but have such limited public access hours (a couple of hours a day for only a few days a week), that they'd simply clutter the database.
We often exclude facilities that otherwise qualified for a listing because the water in the pool is kept too warm for anything resembling "real" swimming. We've eased that restriction somewhat because we want people who like warm-water pools to go to warm-water pools, leaving the cold-water pools to more serious swimmers. If someone who likes warm water pools comes to the site and can find only cold-water pools, s/he's likely to "bite the bullet" and tie up a lane in a good, cold pool - annoying the serious swimmers there and having an unhappy swim of his or her own, too. Still, it is our opinion that a pool kept at a temperature higher than 86°F (30°C) is not a swimming pool. One or two may be included on the site, so our users will know not to go there.
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The principal reason for limiting the number of facilities on the site is to keep the database manageable in size and useful throughout the year. Most hotels and many health clubs have what they may call swimming pools, but many of them are too small to swim in. We think that anything shorter than 15 meters is too short for lap swimming. (We call them "Einstein Pools" keeping track of the number of laps to get in a mile or kilometer long swim gets you into higher mathematics.)
And just about every city and town in the temperate zones has at least one outdoor, seasonal, swimming pool. Most are open from May to September in the Northern Hemisphere or from November through March in the Southern Hemisphere. We've read that there are over 200,000 public, summer-only pools in the United States, alone. If we included all those pools, the database would become too large and too cluttered with listings that are of no use to anyone for 50% to 75% of the year. Searching the database for a pool that's open in the "off-season" would become a tedious and annoying process.
It is our experience that finding a good public pool in summer is easy; even non-swimmers in most communities know where the local public pool can be found. If you can't find a local, go to Google Maps. But finding a good pool after the summer is over is another question. The primary purpose of the site and database is to help swimmers find pools where they can swim whatever the season.
Finally, we have a lot of pools to keep track of here. We spend our days going through the listings in an orderly fashion in an attempt to review each and every one of them periodically. The first time we did it, a full review of every listing took about four years. We're now in our tenth year of the second round of reviews, with about another year or two to go. We're working as fast as we can but adding a few hundred thousand listings to the site would make it impossible to ever finish a single review of every listing.
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The decision as to whether or not a facility will be included or excluded from the site is solely that of the site's editor, (currently Bill Haverland). If he decides to put a pool into the database, it goes in; if he decides not to include a pool, it doesn't go in. It's that simple. Pool operators and swimmers don't get a vote. Whether the owner of a pool likes it or not, if Bill thinks a pool should be listed, he lists it; If he thinks it shouldn't be listed, it doesn't get listed.
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We started developing the database for publication in a book about pools in the United States in 1992. From 1992 through 1995, we mailed questionnaires to thousands of YMCAs, health clubs, hotels, and municipal pools across the country, and published the results in two editions of a book called "Swimmers Guide". The second edition had 3,200 listings, all in the United States. Those pools formed the core of the database.
In 1996, we discovered the Internet and started using it as a tool for research. We began learning the ins-and-outs of the various search engines back then, progressing from the original Internet search engines - Magellan, Web-Crawler, and Northern Lights, to AltaVista and AllTheWeb.com. Now, we use Google and Google Maps almost exclusively.
We first searched in English only, then expanded to Spanish and Portuguese, which we studied in college; then we then learned to use other languages we'd never studied. We've done searches in Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovakian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish, to name a few. (Special thanks to the Google Maps has also become a more and more useful tool in the search for pools to add to the site.
Recently, we discovered a number of swimming-related Facebook groups whose users unintentionally provide leads for places to find pools. Lap Swimmer of the world, did you swim today?, and Swimmers Over 60 are among the most useful and interesting.
And, while working with the search engines on our own, we've also received information for hundreds of listings from other swimmers who used the "Add a Pool" tool on the site.
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There is no charge for a facility, a club, or a team to be listed on the Places2Swim.com website. Feel free to Add a Pool.
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