The center
What we think the community needs
Start with the functions rather than the floor plan. These are the capabilities Washtenaw County is short of.
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Substantial flexible training and competition water.
Enough lanes, at hours people can actually use, for school teams, clubs and lap swimmers at the same time — and configurable so that both long course and short course work without rebuilding anything.
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Dedicated warm teaching water.
Warm, shallow, and permanently scheduled for instruction, so lessons are never the thing that gets moved. This is where the county actually learns to swim.
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Deep-water capability.
For diving, and for the training that needs real depth: lifeguard certification, scuba instruction, and fire and rescue practice.
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Therapy and accessible programming.
Warmer and shallower again, with an entry someone can walk into — for rehabilitation, arthritis, recovery from surgery, and older swimmers who need the water to carry them.
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Capacity to host events without displacing everyday users.
A meet weekend should not cancel a month of lessons, a school team's practice or a senior water class. That is a question of having enough separate water, not of having a bigger pool.
Read this first
Nothing below is a design. There is no architect, no site and no engineering — only a working description of the problem and one possible answer to it, written down so people can argue with it. A feasibility study will test all of it, and when it comes back this page will change and we'll say what changed.
A working concept
One way those functions could fit together
Our current working concept shows what a full build-out capable of meeting all five needs could look like: two long-course pools, a diving well, a teaching pool and a therapy pool. It is a starting point for the conversation, not a decision. The feasibility process will determine whether these functions need five separate bodies of water, whether some can be combined, or whether the build should be phased.
People assume a big pool is a big pool. It isn't. The water a swimmer races in and the water a four-year-old takes a first lesson in are different temperatures, different depths and on different schedules, which is why the five competing needs are described separately here rather than stacked into one basin.
Schools and clubs
The flex pool
An Olympic-length pool with movable walls. Slide them into place and one long course becomes two full short courses — so two teams can train at the same time, or a championship can run at one end while the next heat warms up at the other.
It's deep from end to end rather than sloping to a shallow end, which is what lets it hold water polo matches and artistic swimming as well as racing. One pool, three sports, instead of one.
Competition
The second flex pool
A second Olympic-length pool, built alongside the first from day one — not added later. It's what lets swimmers warm up and cool down without ever taking the competition pool out of service, and it's the difference between a venue that can host a state final and one that can host a national or international championship. The buildings that hold the biggest meets in the sport almost all have two.
A site sized for one pool doesn't have room to grow into two later. Building both from the first drawing is what keeps that option real instead of theoretical.
Diving and deep water
The diving well
Its own pool, set well apart from the racing water, and deep enough for the ten-meter platform — the highest tower in the sport, the one you watch at the Olympics. Springboards and lower platforms beneath it for everyone still working their way up.
Deep water earns its keep the rest of the week too. This is where scuba classes certify, where lifeguards qualify, and where fire and rescue crews train.
Teaching
The lessons pool
Warm, shallow, with a gently sloping entry a nervous child can simply walk into rather than climb down a ladder. This is where the county actually learns to swim — four-year-olds, adult beginners who never got the chance, school groups, seniors.
It runs early morning to late evening, every day of the year, and nothing bumps it. Not a meet, not a rental, not a championship weekend.
Recreation and therapy
The therapy pool
Warmer still, and shallower again. Water takes the weight off a joint that can't bear it on land, which makes this the only exercise available to some people at all — after surgery, with arthritis, during a long recovery.
Rehabilitation providers use this kind of water where they can get it. How much demand exists in this county is one of the things a feasibility study should establish.
The design argument
Racing water is cold. A first lesson needs warm water. That's not a compromise you can split.
Competitive swimmers are working hard and generating heat, so racing water is kept deliberately cool. A four-year-old in a first lesson is doing the opposite — standing still, half-submerged, being asked to be brave. Cold water makes that enormously harder. Someone rehabilitating a new knee needs it warmer still, warm enough that it would be unswimmable for a racer.
Those uses have very different ideal temperatures. One pool cannot be optimized for all of them at the same time. That is why simply adding more lanes doesn't solve every problem — different users need different water.
The scheduling follows the same logic. In a one-pool facility, meet weekends can displace lessons and other community programming, and a championship can bump a seniors' water class. The community program is usually what moves, because the meet has a published schedule and the lesson doesn't. Separate water largely removes that conflict — a state final can run on a Saturday while a dozen four-year-olds have a lesson forty feet away, in warmer water, at the same time.
The money question
What this would cost
A facility of this scale would be a major community investment. We don't yet know what it would cost to build or operate in Washtenaw County. Establishing those numbers — and determining whether a sustainable funding model exists — is one of the main purposes of a professional feasibility study.
What comparable places cost to build
Recent North American municipal and community facilities. Costs are as reported; the 2026 equivalents are ours, converted using the Turner Building Cost Index rather than consumer inflation, which badly understates construction escalation.
- Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin (2010) — a ten-lane 50-meter pool and 600 seats, and little else. $10.3 million, roughly $20 million today. The floor: competition water added to a building that already existed.
- Greensboro, North Carolina (2011) — two 50-meter pools, a separate diving well, a therapy pool and 2,500 seats across 105,000 square feet. $19 million, roughly $36 million today, plus an $8.3 million expansion in 2019.
- Sioux Falls, South Dakota (2016) — a ten-lane 50-meter pool, a zero-depth recreation pool, a warm therapy pool and 500 seats across 61,000 square feet. $24 million, roughly $37 million today.
- Holland, Michigan (2022) — the closest comparable in our own state: a 50-meter pool, a four-lane diving and training well, a warm leisure pool, a new six-lane lap pool, and therapy rooms run with Mary Free Bed. $26 million, roughly $31–33 million today.
- Elkhart, Indiana (2019) — a ten-lane 50-meter pool, diving well, therapy and instructional pools and 1,200 seats across 171,000 square feet. Budgeted at $32 million. It opened at $72 million.
Two things that list says. Programs close to the one described above have been built in the Midwest in the thirties of millions. And Elkhart is the reason nobody should trust a first number, including ours.
What they cost to run
Aquatics centers rarely break even on operations, and every additional body of water adds a system to heat, filter and staff.
Greensboro reports an annual operating deficit of about $350,000 on a $1.5 million budget. Sioux Falls budgeted a $500,000 first-year shortfall and came close to breaking even, helped by attendance of roughly 220,000 against a projection of 80,000. Dalton, Georgia planned something far smaller — one 50-meter pool and one therapy pool — and still projected a $1 million annual gap before cancelling the project on cost.
Ann Arbor has lived a small version of this: the city weighed closing Mack Pool during the 2009 downturn over a roughly $100,000 annual shortfall.
Two models are worth studying. Holland runs its center through an independent municipal authority whose boundaries match the school district, with capital from a bond millage and operations from a separate one-mill levy that voters renewed in May 2023 with 76% support. Elkhart raised a $10 million endowment dedicated to operating costs. Both answer a question a capital campaign on its own cannot.
What meets actually pay for
A championship weekend fills hotels, restaurants and gas stations across the county, and it brings rental and admission revenue into the building. That's real, and it's the reason the competition half of this project earns its place. But economic impact lands mostly in the community, not in the facility's bank account. Meets narrow the operating gap. They don't close it.
What goes on inside
A championship venue is empty most of the year. This one wouldn't be.
The meets are what people picture. They're a handful of weekends. The rest of the time the building belongs to the county:
Every week
Learn-to-swim from toddlers up. Adult beginners. School PE and district swim teams. Lap swim before work. Masters and senior water classes. Physical therapy. Family open swim on a Sunday afternoon.
Regularly
Club practices and dual meets. Water polo. Diving and artistic swimming clubs — neither of which the county can really support today. Lifeguard certification. Scuba classes. Rescue and dive-team training.
Several times a year
High school district, regional and state meets. Club championships. Masters competitions. The kind of weekend that brings visiting families into the county for two or three nights.
The big ones
Collegiate conference and national championships, and national team selection meets. Whether events at that level would come here is one of the things a feasibility study would test.
Spectators
You don't build the big number. You build the right number and add seats.
Permanent seating is the expensive kind, and most of it sits empty most of the year. The usual answer is a modest permanent gallery plus temporary stands for the weekends that need them. Greensboro's 105,000-square-foot complex seats about 2,500 permanently; the largest permanent indoor swimming crowd in the United States, in Indianapolis, is around 4,500.
A permanent gallery in the low thousands, designed so temporary seating can be brought in for a championship, puts Washtenaw County in genuinely serious company without building a half-empty arena the community then has to heat for fifty years.
Unsettled
What we don't know yet
A list like this usually gets left off a project website. We think publishing it is the fastest way to find the people who know the answers.
Where
No site has been identified. Location drives cost, transit access, parking, and which jurisdiction's approvals are required — and a complex this size needs a lot of land.
Who owns and runs it
A county facility? A nonprofit? A joint arrangement between municipalities, school districts and a university? Each carries different funding tools and different risks.
Who the anchor tenants are
Reliable, contracted users — clubs, school districts, a collegiate program — are what make the operating math work. We have no agreements with anyone.
How the annual gap gets covered
Developing a sustainable operating model is one of the central questions the feasibility process will need to answer.
Whether all five pools survive
This is a target, not a promise, and a feasibility study can still cut something. If it does, we'd argue hardest for the lessons pool — it's the reason the rest of it matters.
How much unmet demand there really is
We can describe the squeeze on this county's water, but we cannot yet document it: practice schedules, lesson waitlists, what districts pay for lane time, programs that got displaced. Gathering that is one of our next jobs — and if the numbers come back smaller than we expect, we'll say so.
Whether it should happen at all
An honest feasibility study can come back negative. If it does, we'll publish that too.
Know something we don't?
If you've built or operated a facility like this, run a municipal budget, written a successful capital grant, coached at this level, or simply know who owns a suitable piece of land — you are exactly who we're trying to reach.