Local swimmer Alex Parent should be entirely focused on his training in the pool this summer.
The 17-year-old, a prospect for Team Canada’s junior national Paralympic swim team, should be working closely with his longtime coach, Roman Ramirez, to ensure he’s in the best shape possible.
He should be, but he’s not.
Instead of worrying about shaving time off his personal best freestyle time, the discipline in which Parent excels, he’s been forced to worry about finding both pool time to practice and a training regiment to help him reach his goals.
At the root of Parent’s concerns is the fact the Aquanauts have been forced to cut their season short a month and terminate Ramirez’s contract due to financial constraints.
Normally both would have continued on until the end of June.
Instead, last weekend’s invitational swim meet in Thunder Bay marked the final event of the Aquanauts’ abbreviated season—and the last time Ramirez would coach the team.
The reason behind the cuts? Money.
Aquanauts president John Dutton said the team no longer can afford to operate this season given the costs associated with paying a coach and renting pool time at the Memorial Sports Centre.
“For coach and pool for the month of June, if we were going to continue, we would be looking at over $6,000 and we are tapped right now,” Dutton said.
He noted the Aquanauts have seen pool rental fees rise from $23 per hour four years ago to $60 an hour beginning next season.
Based on a nine-month season, the increase translates into a jump in pool costs from $15,000 a year to close to $40,000 next season—something the club simply could not afford given its present budget.
The club’s concern over rising pool fees is not new.
Two years ago, Fort Frances town council planned to raise the pool fees to $60/hr. effective immediately.
Dutton went to council to voice his concerns and they agreed to raise the price incrementally—doubling the cost the first year and then increasing it $7.50 each of the following two years.
“Had they done it all at once, we would have shut down as a team the very first year,” Dutton said of the urgency surrounding his visit.
George Bell, the town’s manager of community services, said the fee hikes were necessary to bring them in line with other municipalities across the province.
“We did a comparison with all the pools in Ontario and found the rates here were very, very low and not consistent with what we were charging other user groups, so we spent two or three years bringing them in line,” Bell said.
In fact, even at the current fee levels, Bell said the town only is recovering a percentage of what it costs to run the facility.
“We cannot charge anything more than what it costs to run these buildings and we only recover about 60 percent of the cost of running this facility,” Bell noted. “The rest comes from taxes.”
The incremental increase in pool fees was the only concession Dutton was able to negotiate with the town.
One of the concerns raised by several councillors at the time was the fact the Aquanauts paid their coach a salary. Council suggested the Aquanauts find a volunteer to coach the team, as is the case with most of the other sports clubs in town, in order to save money.
It was a solution Dutton hesitated to embrace given the nature of swimming.
“Honestly, it’s a lot more sophisticated technically than other sports,” he remarked.
“I wouldn’t like to say that anyone can coach hockey because it’s not true, but at the same time, a lot of people coach hockey and very few people have the skills or the background to coach swimming, and you pretty much have to go out and find a coach that has that background,” Dutton argued.
“It’s difficult and I’m not sure they see it from our standpoint.”
However, the financial reality faced by the club this season meant that Aquanauts’ management finally was forced to make the tough decision and relieve Ramirez of his duties.
“We had to cut salary,” Dutton said. “It was our only alternative.
“It’s unfortunate because Roman has done a really good job for us here but as I said to him when I sat down with him, we’re just not in a position where we can manage this at this point.”
Understandably, Ramirez is not pleased to be looking for new employment opportunities and is sad to be leaving the town he’s called home for the past several years.
But while he’s concerned about what the future holds for him personally, Ramirez said he’s also concerned about Parent and his quest to make the national team.
“It’s frustrating and it’s really sad because I have one swimmer who’s a prospect for the national team, but he’s not going to be there probably because he’s not going to have a coach, he’s not going to have pool time,” Ramirez stressed.
For his part, Parent is maintaining a positive attitude and doing his best to make the best of a tough situation.
“It’s definitely really frustrating to not have the opportunity to continue to swim when I want to so bad,” he said. “I have to work with it, though, and deal with it.”
Parent will continue to train with former Aquanaut Heather Dutton, an accomplished swimmer in her own right, in order to stay in shape. However, he said the loss of Ramirez is something that won’t be easy to overcome.
“He had a lot of good input,” Parent said of Ramirez. “He brought a lot to our team. It’s like losing a good friend almost now. He’s been here for four years.
“It’s no good.”
Whatever the future holds for the Aquanauts, Parent will continue to strive towards his goal of making the national team and hopefully representing Canada in the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing—even if he needs to do it on his own.
(Fort Frances Times)
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
