HANNAH KUBBINS

News Editor

If you haven’t made your way to an open swim session at the Trumbull Aquatic Center, you might consider the walk down this semester. Starting Sept. 5, the aquatics center will be launching a new program they’ve dubbed “Rec Zone.”

“I don’t know how many of our students even know the pool is open for them,” said Chris Crume, director of the aquatics center. Crume is starting his 5th year in his position and handles everything related to the aquatics center whether it be working with student lifeguards, maintaining the facility, swim meets and most recently the Rec Zone program.

Rec Zone will take place Monday through Friday from 7:30 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Crume continued, “we’ve got two new features we’re going to be rolling out Sept. 5th: pick-up games of water basketball and Key Log log rolling.” If you have no idea what log rolling is, take a look at the Trumbull Aquatic center’s Facebook page for a video.

“Our head lifeguards trained on the log roller the other day to learn how to facilitate it and had a blast. So, if you haven’t had a chance to do something like that, come on down here and check it out. I think a lot of people will have fun with that,” Crume said.

Head lifeguard Michael Shanahan ‘19 commented “We’ve put a lot of effort toward familiarizing ourselves with the equipment to ensure that everybody has the best time possible. The log roller is the most exciting piece of equipment I’ve ever seen used in a pool and I had a lot of fun training on it.”

Plans are currently in the works to bring water volleyball later this semester in the shallow end of the pool, but there’s no definitive date on when that will be offered. Crume said there might be special Friday night programming, but they want to see what kind of response they get to Rec Zone before launching more activities.

When asked how this idea was developed, Crume replied “after looking at what we offer in open swims, we decided that we wanted to focus on getting our students down here. We want to make this a place where people can swim a lap if they want to, but if you want to try something new we have options for that as well.”

When Crume refers to “we” he’s talking about the head lifeguards at Trumbull.

“This was really driven by our head lifeguards. They wanted to see some new stuff offered here, so we spoke to colleagues at other colleges to see what they were doing and brought it here.”

    Programming like Rec Zone wasn’t always possible at Denison.

“At the old pool, we didn’t have much room to do anything like this. We were always looking for more ways to serve the student body but now we have the space and means,” Crume said.

    “We’re really excited to see how this goes,” Crume said. To learn more about what some of the activities will look like, head to their pages on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or SnapChat.

Photo Courtesy of Chris Crume