 Welcome to Serving Locally with Me, your host, Michelle Dynas, the podcast where we spotlight service in the Longmont and surrounding communities. Alright, let's connect. I'm host Michelle. Today we are here with Molly and Heather of the City Longmont Recreation Department and I'm just going to start off with introducing Molly and just let us know who you are and introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Molly Morris. I am an Aquatics Program Coordinator for the City of Longmont. So my area of expertise is kind of at the pool working with lifeguards, swim teams, a lot of programming, different events. I have been in Aquatics for a little over 11 years now. Wow. So a lot of experience that's stayed with me my whole life and it's something very passionate and excited to be in. Awesome. And then also welcome Heather. Hi, my name is Heather. I am currently the swim lesson specialist at the City of Longmont. I absolutely love it. I've kind of gone through a lot of different careers, not a lot, some different careers. And I started teaching some lessons when I was 15 and I just gravitated my way back there and I just absolutely love it and would highly recommend it to anyone. And I am Michelle and I am a supervisor at the ice rink this year and that's been awesome. So we're all on the same team. That's great. It's a lot of fun. If you could just give us a quick overview of what the City of Longmont Recreation is all about. So the City of Longmont Recreation is all about providing a safe, friendly, fun family atmosphere for the youth and families of Longmont and even senior citizens all use our Recreation Center. It's a way to get active, healthy and enjoy your community. That's awesome. Is there anything you'd like to add to that? We've got lots of different options. We've got our indoor recreation pool, which is great for families. We've got two big slides. We've got the little baby slide, lots of water features, lazy river, diving board. There's six lap lanes. We have Centennial Pool, which is a little bit on the older side, but it's really great for those morning lap swimmers where you can get some morning workouts in. And then we program it heavy with swim lessons and a care swim team, diving classes, all those fun things. We also have Sunset Pool, which is really fun. Our outdoor pool also has two big water slides, a high dive, low dive, six lap lanes, lots of room for activities. And then our ice rink and Union Reservoir. We have lots of opportunities for people to have fun in the water. That's great. We've gone to a couple of things. Union, my husband likes to go fishing at Union. We've gone swimming there. That's been fun. The kids took swim lessons at Centennial and we live right just up the street from Centennial Pool. So that's great. We have gone to the Longmont Rec Center. My daughter's like, we need to go swimming. Yeah, maybe next time. So we need to do those things. But yeah, that's awesome. What is your focus at the City of Longmont Recreation? So yeah, we're mainly focused on teaching people how to be safe near and around the water. We have our lifeguards that are ready to act at any moment. And they're preventing any traumatizing experiences that may happen. We're the memory makers of the pool. And we really want to keep those memories positive and fun. We want to give people the opportunity to go to the birthday parties with their friends and go swimming and be able to go off the diving board and not be stuck in a lifejacket or stuck in the shallow end. You can go have fun. And there's lots of other cool water activities that go on beyond the pool, right? You know, take it through your whole life. You can go scuba diving, kayaking, paddle boarding, just safe on a boat. You can go fishing, lots of other things. It's a super important life skill. And we just want to make it positive and a fun experience for everybody. I love that. It's a focus on safety for everybody that, yeah, I love that. That's my focus at the ice rink too, just to make sure everybody's safe. And call an ambulance if I need to. And having fun as well. Absolutely. Right? The ice rink is, yeah, a great place to have fun. Absolutely. And it's such a, as Sarah said, it's a novelty. So it's, you know, it's short lived, but man, you can make some great memories. I know my daughter had been able to skate there this year. She's just absolutely loved it. And that's going to stick with her. And that means a lot to me as a mom. Right. And in a good, safe environment where I know that it's going to be okay. Yeah. Awesome. Who are you trying to reach at your organization? I think we're trying to outreach to all of the city of Longmont community as well as areas beyond. We have quite a few people who come in from other areas because they know that we provide that really safety forward and very fun environment. And we also have some of the best women structures that can provide this amazing programming that people do come for. And as well as the outreach, we also have a lot of internal reach. So think the youth of Longmont, we hire all kinds of teenagers. The amount, I think I did over 40 interviews for 15 year olds getting their first job last year. So we're providing these life experiences, that opportunity to grow, that opportunity to learn things in a very safe, like it's okay to be wrong sometimes. And this is the time to do it when you're that young. And so we get that outreach and building these experiences for people in the community. I really like working with the kids of youth. You know, this 15 year olds coming in and their first job. I like that they get a good experience and a good foundation. Because at some jobs it's lackluster. You know, they get away with being disrespectful or, you know, coming to work without a uniform. And that's not okay. Right. It's not okay to start out these good habits and that you guys hire so many, so young is a great, is a great thing just for, not just for those kids, but for the community to start them out on a good foundation of what it's like to be in the real world and having a job, a real life job. I think one thing we are really proud of at the city of Longmont is we retain our staff really well too. We've had some staff that have been there that it was their first job and they're still with us five years later. Yeah, that's great. So we pride ourselves on making that really amazing environment that people want to come back to, not just our staff, but the patrons as well. Yeah, that's fantastic. I think that's huge. It's a really rewarding experience to get to see somebody terrified of the water, not wanting to get in at all to wanting to jump in the 12 feet and able to do that, right? It's about confidence. It's huge. And from the parent side too, right? You see all their anxiety just wash away. It's really a fun, rewarding job and it's super flexible. You can make it work around your school schedule. You can just do a couple hours a week. You can combine it with life-guarding and you can work daytime hours if that's your availability. There's lots of different options and you get to go home and feel good about what you did with your day. Absolutely. That one as an employee. I feel that. It's fantastic. What makes the work of Longmont Recreation different than other similar serving organizations? Yeah, so the city of Longmont really strives to reach everyone. We have a lot of different opportunities for people to get in, whether, you know, of their financial status. We have a 200 free swim lesson program that we did last year and we're doing again this year. And we're basically giving 200 people between six to eight lessons totally free. Getting them in the door, start to learn to love the water. And then we have scholarship opportunities and lots of lots of other channels that they can take some lessons and learn to love the water. It's really great. You know, and teaching that life skill is just so essential to everybody. So one thing that's really cool is we are part of the Colorado Parks and Rec Association. So places like the YMCA or other organizations that aren't part of this, they don't get the opportunity the same that we do as we have subsidized free swim meets for our swim team because we are part of the state and part of the municipality organization. So we cover our swim team dues for the most part. You have to pay for your practice, but we pay for the swim meets. They have the opportunity to go compete with other kids all across the front range for free. Another thing is a lot of organizations require you if you're going to work there to get your certification and pay for that whole certification. We offer a hugely discounted certification program. So if you're going to come work for us like your CPR in your first aid, if you need that to work for us, we will take care of that. We'll get you in our class. We'll run you through our program and you'll get that certification. So for our lifeguards, the cost of a class in Denver right now is almost $350. And for a city of Longmont employee, we will provide that at the cost of the class, which is about $50. Wow. And it's here. It would be local then. And it would be local. And it's a straight avenue into a job. Right. With a really fun community. It's also a nationally recognized certification that you could take anywhere, right? Take to other pools. Yeah. A lot of, most pools do recognize American Red Cross. So it's a great thing to, we have kids who work for us during the summer. And then they go work at their pools at college. And so they have that continuous opportunity to take the skills that we're teaching them and keep using them. It's really cool. Fantastic. I didn't know that either. That's, that's really good. I want to take a safety class. It's a great building block for anybody that wants to go into nursing or doctors or paramedics or anything where you need that CPR certification. You already have it. I honestly think everybody should take it to be a good active, you know, part of your community to be able to help people in that way. Why not take it? Cause that could be anywhere. You can be at the grocery store. I need CPR. Even like life, lifeguard classes like that would be, I would love to take those just so I have that knowledge. Not just for my kids, but anywhere I'm at it could, you know, you can take that anywhere. So that's, that's not just just for personal or just for family, but just for community. Fantastic. And to go along with that, we also have our swim instructor courses. So we have one American Red Cross water safety instructor. And then we also have our in-house long month swim instructor programs. And anyone who's interested in working with youth, we've had people who hardly knew how to swim. We'll teach them how to swim. And then we teach them like if you have passion about working with kids and you're passionate about teaching, it's a great opportunity to get into those lower levels of like, Hey, this is what it could be like. If you want to grow your career in this way, it's an awesome way. You learn more by teaching at any rate. So I've learned that with the kids with homeschooling is the more they can help each other with their schoolwork, the more they're learning themselves. So to be able to teach, you know, if you're not really good at it to learn and then teach it, you are just using those skills and learning it more yourself. You're building your confidence, you're figuring out how to talk to people, how to talk to parents, how to act professionally in a workplace. There's a lot of really great benefits about working with the City of Lawnmine. All of this is just wonderful. What are your greatest needs? Our greatest needs right now is we have a lot of really great programs and we would love to have more people to come help run them and teach and provide staffing so that we can continue to give back even more to the community right now. We have so many programs that our pool is out programmed on Sunday mornings. There is almost no room to add another class. And so getting more time that we can give to the community in our pool spaces and having more people who are excited to come in and teach those things I think is one of our biggest needs right now. And lifeguards too, right? People to watch those classes and pool managers to make sure that everything's running. And as we said before, there's lots of room for opportunities, right? If you want those early morning, those opening shifts right before you go to work. If you need those shifts while your kids are in school and you just want to work those daytime hours or if you're in high school and you want to come after school, that's a good time. The flexibility with the schedule has been enormous for us. Maybe going to school mom and then all the other things that I do, it's been amazing. The support that I've gotten from our team of the flexibility of I need to do this. The kids have a dentist. It's all good, we got you. That's incredible. I have not found that anywhere else. We really are a strong team and everybody kind of looks out for each other and takes care of each other when we need to. It's a really great environment. Any other needs? I think we want a new pool. Yeah, I think we want a bigger pool, a new rec center. We would love to have that in our community. Do you have any events coming up or volunteer opportunities? I know some events that I've been able to be a part of that I don't know if you guys, I know that the ice rink and stuff has been involved with the parade and stuff, but that city is at recreation. But the turkey trot was recreation. The turkey trot was Longmont Light is put on by the recreation department. So yeah, I've been able to be a part of those for the last couple of years, turkey trot and the Longmont Lights. So that's been awesome. What other types of things do you guys have coming up or just throughout the year and then volunteer opportunities? I think we're really excited about our underwater Easter egg hunt coming up. So it's, we put a bunch of little eggs in the pool and kids get the opportunity to go swimming, diving for them. We still have the pools open to kind of just have fun. Last year we had some golden eggs where we had prize baskets available and it was just a really fun family event. Get people in and a different way to celebrate the holiday. Any other events coming up? We have a couple of certification courses for incoming staff over the course of spring break. So I know our lifeguard class is 16th through 19th. We have... Yes, we also have lots of swim instructor options. So our in-house Longmont swim instructor program we have one on March 9th and March 10th that will be Saturday and a Sunday class. We tried to make that on spring break or right before spring break make it easier for everybody and then if you can't make that one we have another one March 20th and 21st. So Wednesday and a Thursday I believe that would just be kind of an all-day on those two days and we would teach you how to hold kids how to talk to parents all the little pieces of the swim lessons and then once we hire you on we would have you shadow with some other instructors for a session so you're not thrown to the wolves already and then once you're ready we'll let you fly and it's a really fun experience. We also have a water safety instructor class and that would be where you can read cross certification that you can take anywhere. That one is May 28th to May 31st so that's a really good opportunity as well. And then we have our swim aid program which is a really fun program for those kids under 15 that have a little bit of interest in getting into this or just testing it out and seeing what it's like so you would come for a four hour class and that would be on June and you would just come to that class get a little bit of shadowing experience we teach you the basics and then you can volunteer at any of our lessons and we'll have you in with other instructors, highly experienced instructors they'll be leading the class but you get to just be in the class working with the kids kind of figuring out is this something that you really want to do and then we'll keep you go in throughout the whole year if you want or just in the summer we'll hire you on it's a really great opportunity that's fantastic because I know my kids always looking to do something yeah we we would love to have any and all help that's fantastic I like that there's even for not just hiring but that you can come and help for younger kids that's fantastic and they get so much out of it too they get to watch those kids that are terrified go all the way to jumping in the deep end too and they get to see that and then they're hooked that's fantastic cool so how can people contact and find out more about Longmont Recreation I know I'm pretty sure it's already on my link tree because of being involved with the Turkey Trot and Parade and Longmont Lights and stuff but they're already on the link tree I'll have all this stuff in those show notes how they can get in contact yeah perfect so you can reach out to any of us you can reach out to me or Molly or any of the team we have kind of a group email if you just email swim at LongmontColorado.gov we'll take care of you and we'll send you to the right person there answer any and all questions you're welcome to just come in and see what it's like see how lifeguards run their operations see how some swim instructor classes look see if this is something you even want to do and then we go from there we're excited to see if this is something that you want to do I think we do a lot of giving a lot of opportunities to try it out check it out and then it may not be for everyone but it is a really fun opportunity for quite a few people there's different opportunities within it so we just finding that one thing is there anything else you would like to add maybe that you guys are passionate about or you just feel like oh I really want to talk more about this and I'll just give you guys the floor for a couple minutes of just whatever you feel like you would like to share what do you have Molly I don't know join our swim team so our swim team has been a feeder swim team to several of the high schools so most recently I had kids who have been swimming with me for the past year just joined the girls high school team I can't remember which high school but when I went and talked to their high school swim team about recruiting we now have six kids who I coach how to swim and we got them all the way and now they're going into our lifeguarding class on spring break so that's one thing that's really cool about our opportunities at the rec center is that we have lifeguards who took swim lessons with us when they were little babies and now to see them like they had such a great experience that they're now being fed into our programs and they keep going so it's a really cool thing to see just the growth that we're getting and then that our kids on the swim team and I'm sure in swim lessons as well they're having so much fun that they want to stay and then they want to come back and work for us so yeah join the swim team and there's lots of room for opportunities after that too right you can go into management you can teach new instructors how to teach get lots of certifications the city pays for a majority of your certifications there's a million different things that you can do within the recreation department and they can support you it's a really good it's a great environment I agree I like it awesome I just want to say thank you guys for coming on the show and that uh for all that you do in the community I think that's fantastic these life skills and memories are something that is just rooted in a good community and that helps strengthen a community for sure so I just want to say thanks again thanks thank you so much for having us Michelle thank you thank you to my guests my listeners and my supporters for being together we can strengthen our community please like and subscribe do all those other things you know you gotta do them because that's the easiest way that you can serve right now alright now go connect with others and be a blessing