Why it matters
Swimming is recreation, exercise and sport. It is also a life skill.
In a county surrounded by lakes, rivers and ponds, access to swim instruction matters. But learning to swim requires something increasingly difficult to find in Washtenaw County: available indoor water.
The national picture
Drowning deaths are rising again after decades of decline.
4,500+
people drowned each year in the U.S. between 2020 and 2022 — about 500 more per year than in 2019.
CDC Vital Signs, May 2024
#1
cause of death for children ages 1–4. Drowning rates have also climbed sharply among adults over 65.
CDC Vital Signs, May 2024
40M
American adults (15.4%) don't know how to swim. More than half have never taken a lesson.
CDC Vital Signs, May 2024
In Michigan
A state defined by water, and very few guarded places to swim in it.
Michigan has roughly 1,220 public beaches. Only a small fraction of them have a lifeguard. The state parks began cutting lifeguard programs in 1983 and had eliminated the last of them by 1991 — a decision made on cost and staffing, three decades before anyone framed it as a water safety question. Communities followed: Ludington ended its program around 2010 to save $27,000; Muskegon ended its the same year.
Between 2006 and 2024, a study of state death records counted 3,041 drowning deaths in Michigan — roughly 160 a year, across a population that swims in lakes, rivers, quarries and ponds all summer long. (That figure counts both unintentional and intentional deaths; the researchers examined the two together.)
The drownings closest to us are the ones nobody counts.
Great Lakes drownings are tracked carefully — a nonprofit has logged 1,488 of them since 2010. But Michigan has no statewide tracking of inland lake drownings at all. Over a single Fourth of July weekend in 2025, reporters counted nearly a dozen people drowned in inland lakes and private ponds, a figure assembled from news stories because no agency compiles one.
Washtenaw County is not on a Great Lake. Every drowning that happens here happens in exactly the category Michigan doesn't measure.
Here
We are a landlocked county, and we are soaked in water.
It's easy to think of water safety as a Lake Michigan problem — something that happens on vacation, two hours west. The map says otherwise.
The Huron River runs the length of this county, through Dexter, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, with Hudson Mills, Dexter–Huron and Delhi metroparks strung along it and a chain of impoundments — Barton Pond, Argo Pond, Ford Lake — behind its dams. On a warm Saturday it carries hundreds of people in tubes, kayaks and canoes.
Ring the county and you find Independence Lake, Whitmore Lake, Base Line and Portage Lakes, Silver Lake, Halfmoon Lake, Bishop Lake. The county health department samples six public beaches every summer, Memorial Day through September, and publishes the results.
Sampling the water for bacteria is not the same as watching the people in it. A local family guide to swimming near Ann Arbor lists eleven lakes and beaches. Exactly one of them has lifeguards — Independence Lake, run by Washtenaw County Parks, staffed from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The state recreation areas at Pinckney, Waterloo and Brighton have none at all.
Which makes water competency matter more
When lifeguards aren't present, water competency becomes especially important — but swimming ability is only one layer of water safety, alongside active supervision, life jackets and safe behavior around water. A community can't control every lake and river. It can make sure more people have the opportunity to learn how to swim.
Who gets left out
The dividing line isn't income or neighborhood. It's whether your family organizes its life around swimming.
Most families in this county would like their children to learn to swim. Interest is rarely the barrier. What it actually takes to produce a child who can swim here, right now, is three things at once: a family that puts swimming ahead of the other ten things competing for the same Saturday, that can pay private-lesson prices, and that has enough slack in its schedule to be at a pool during the narrow hours a pool is open to the public. Miss any one of the three and the child usually doesn't learn.
That cuts across every group in the county. There are families in expensive neighborhoods whose children can't swim because both parents work fixed hours, and families on tight budgets whose children swim because a grandparent drives them every week. Washtenaw County is not divided into populations that swim and populations that don't. It is divided into families who happen to have all three of those things and families missing one — and the missing one is almost always cost, distance, hours, or a parent who never learned to swim either.
Cost
79% of kids in lower-income households can barely swim
In USA Swimming Foundation's national study, 79% of children in households earning under $50,000 a year had no or low swimming ability. In Washtenaw County, 13.9% of residents live below the poverty line — around 51,000 people. Private swim schools fill the gap for families who can pay; that is the whole mechanism.
Distance
Lessons happen where the pools are
The county's indoor pools sit in Ann Arbor, Saline, Chelsea, Dexter and Whitmore Lake. If you live in Manchester, Milan, Augusta Township or the eastern edge of Ypsilanti, the nearest lesson is a drive — one that requires a car, a free hour, and a parent who isn't at work.
Hours
Most of the water is spoken for
Most pools here belong to school districts, so school teams and school schedules come first. What's left for the public is a weekday late morning or a Saturday afternoon. If you work those hours, that water isn't really available to you. The inventory is below.
Generations
A parent who never learned can't teach
More than half of American adults have never taken a swimming lesson. Someone who isn't confident in water can't teach a child, can't supervise with any real margin, and can't perform a rescue. Adult beginner classes aren't a side program — they're how the cycle breaks.
What this means for a building
A facility only closes these gaps if the hours and the price work for the families in them: evenings and weekends, sliding-scale fees without a humiliating application, transit access, and enough teaching water that a lesson isn't rationed. A beautiful pool with a $180 session fee and a 10 a.m. weekday schedule solves nothing. That has to be designed in from the start, not added later.
The squeeze
Five groups need this county's indoor water, and there isn't enough for all of them.
The access problem above is the one families feel directly. Underneath it is a second problem, and it is the reason the first one keeps getting worse: the water that exists here is already spoken for several times over.
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Teaching needs warm water.
Lessons happen in water warm enough for someone standing still and nervous. Racing water is kept cold on purpose. A pool can be one or the other, and the schedule decides which — which is why lessons are what get moved.
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Recreation and therapy need accessible water.
Warmer still, shallower, with an entry someone can walk into. Rehabilitation providers use this kind of water where it is available. How much of that demand exists in this county, and how much of it goes unmet, is something a feasibility study should establish.
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Schools need lanes.
Physical education, swim and dive teams, and water safety instruction all need dependable, affordable lane time. Ann Arbor's middle schools lost theirs in two rounds of budget cuts, and a district without its own water has to buy time in someone else's.
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Clubs need training space.
Year-round programs need consistent practice water at hours that families can manage. This is what we hear about most from the coaches and instructors we've talked to. We would rather prove it than assert it, and documenting it properly — real practice times, real waitlists, real programs that got squeezed out — is on our list.
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Competitive swimming needs a regional venue.
A championship needs a building constructed to the standard the sport uses, and enough room for the people who come to watch. After May 2027 the county's only 50-meter pool is Michigan Athletics' own building — not a community facility, and at about 1,200 seats too small for the state and club championships this region needs somewhere to hold.
This is an allocation problem before it is a building problem
None of those five groups is wrong to want water, and none of them can reasonably be told to want less. What they are really competing over is hours in a handful of pools — and every closure in the last decade has made that competition sharper, without removing a single one of the needs. The inventory below is the whole supply.
The inventory
Washtenaw County is not without pools. It is without water.
You'll sometimes hear this project described as if the county had nothing. That isn't true, and saying it would cost us credibility with exactly the people we need. Here is the honest inventory of year-round indoor pools the public can get into.
| Pool | Operated by | Public access |
|---|---|---|
| Mack Indoor Pool | City of Ann Arbor, at Ann Arbor Open School | Open swim, lap swim, lessons, swim team. Runs a season roughly late September to end of April. |
| Meri Lou Murray Recreation Center | Washtenaw County Parks & Recreation, Ann Arbor | Pool rebuilt and reopened September 2026. Open swim, lap swim, family nights, lessons, scholarships available. |
| Saline Recreation Center | City of Saline | A warm leisure pool with zero-depth entry, plus a lap pool. |
| Dexter Community Pool | Dexter Community Schools | Select Saturday and Sunday afternoons. |
| Cameron Pool | Chelsea School District, at Beach Middle School | Weekday late mornings and Saturday afternoons. |
| Whitmore Lake Community Pool | Whitmore Lake Public Schools | Weekends, roughly noon to 3 p.m. |
Read that column on the right again. Most of these are school pools, which means school teams and school schedules come first and the public gets the leftovers — a Saturday afternoon here, a weekday midday slot there. For a county of roughly 370,000 people, including about 64,000 under the age of 18, that is not a lot of open water.
Ask anyone who has tried to sign a four-year-old up for lessons here what the waitlist looks like. The constraint is not desire. It is lane-hours.
May 9, 2027
And the competition water is about to get smaller.
Washtenaw County has two university competition pools. Neither is a community facility — both are athletic venues, booked first around their own teams — and only one of them has been hosting the kind of meet this region needs a venue for.
- Canham Natatorium (University of Michigan, opened 1988) — a 50-meter, eight-lane pool with a diving well and about 1,200 spectator seats. It hosts NCAA and Big Ten championships. It is Michigan Athletics' building, and at that capacity it is too small for the events that fill a natatorium with families — high school state finals and club state championships among them.
- Jones Natatorium (Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti) — host of the MHSAA Lower Peninsula Division 2 girls' state finals in 2025. Closing May 9, 2027.
What EMU said, and why it matters here
After more than forty years of exposure to a pool environment, the building has deteriorated past the point EMU is willing to fund. Renovation was priced at $19.2–$21.5 million with 18–24 months of closure; replacement at $30–$33 million. The university concluded continued operation is “financially unsustainable beyond 2027,” and said its women's swimming and diving program would likely be discontinued after next season unless an NCAA-compliant alternative is found.
President Brendan Kelly: “We have not been able to identify one in the region at this point. That is the most heartbreaking part of this entire situation. But we are working on that problem.”
We want to be careful here, because it would be easy to overclaim. FWCA is not proposing to rescue EMU's athletic program, and we have no agreement with the university. But the closure tells you something true about this region: a 40-year-old competition pool reached the end of its life, and no institution within reach could absorb it. The next one will be someone's problem too, unless a community builds one on purpose and plans for its whole lifespan.
The MHSAA's own finals schedule shows the geography. In 2025, Lower Peninsula girls' finals ran at Oakland University, Eastern Michigan, and the Holland Aquatic Center. The plan for 2026–27 lists Jenison High School, Holland, and Oakland. Eastern Michigan comes off the list. For families in this county, a championship weekend becomes a drive and two hotel nights, somewhere else.
And it isn't only competition water
Ann Arbor closed five middle school pools to save $70,000. A program with 1,100 signups ended with them.
In 2013 Ann Arbor Public Schools closed the pools at Clague, Forsythe, Scarlett, Slauson and Tappan middle schools, saving about $70,000. The Rec & Ed learn-to-swim program that ran in them ended; in its last full year it had taken roughly 1,100 signups. Swimming left the middle school curriculum at the same time, so an entire cohort stopped being taught to swim at school at all.
In May 2024 the board voted 6–1 on a $20.4 million package of cuts that again closed the district's middle school pools, this time worth about $520,000 a year. One pool in a middle school building is still running — Mack — and it is open because the city operates it, not the district.
Both decisions were defensible on the night they were taken. A district facing a $20 million shortfall has to cut something, and a pool is a large line item serving a minority of students. That is what makes this pattern so hard to argue with and so hard to stop: there has never been a meeting at which anyone proposed dismantling swimming in this county, so there has never been a meeting at which anyone could vote against it.
And it isn't only this county
Tecumseh voted to fix its pool. It's being demolished anyway.
Tecumseh is twenty miles south of Ann Arbor, in Lenawee County, and what happened there in the last eighteen months is the clearest warning available to anyone thinking about pools in this region.
In November 2024 the community passed a sinking fund for school facilities, with roughly $2.5 million earmarked to replace the roof over the Tecumseh Community Memorial Pool. In April 2025 the pool closed temporarily so the dehumidification and ventilation systems, broken beyond repair, could be replaced ahead of that roof work.
With the building empty, engineers looked harder. Magnus Engineering found extensive corrosion through nearly all of the primary and secondary steel supporting the roof, and reported that the remaining metal thickness “is misleading and should not be relied upon for structural calculations.” The risk of partial or progressive collapse, they wrote, rises with every winter's snow load.
In January 2026 the board chose between rebuilding over the existing basin at $15 million, building a new facility elsewhere at $28 million, or simply demolishing the structure for $2.3 million. It chose demolition, and formed a committee to ask the community what should happen next.
Superintendent Matt Hilton put it plainly: “What began as a mechanical systems replacement project revealed a structural crisis that makes the building unsafe for public occupancy.”
Read that sequence again
Tecumseh did the responsible thing. Voters taxed themselves to fix the roof. The money was there. And it was already too late — the deferred maintenance had gone past the point where money could reach it, and the cheapest remaining option was to knock the building down and have nothing.
The pool had served infants in water-safety classes, adults in rehab, the Tigersharks club, and the middle and high school swim teams. All of it ended at once. The district is now exploring a co-op swim team with neighboring districts, because its own athletes have nowhere to practice.
This is what happens to a pool that isn't planned for its whole life. It is the single strongest argument we can make for building the next one properly — and for funding its maintenance before anyone cuts a ribbon.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from a public document you can check yourself. If we've got something wrong, tell us and we'll correct it.
- AnnArbor.com — for the 2013 closure of the five AAPS middle school pools, the $70,000 saving, the end of the Rec & Ed learn-to-swim program, and its roughly 1,100 signups in its last full year.
- Bridge Michigan — for the May 2024 AAPS board vote, 6–1, on $20.4 million in cuts including $520,000 a year from closing the middle school pools, and for the surviving city-run pool inside a middle school.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vital Signs: Drowning Deaths Rise in the United States, May 14, 2024. cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/s0514-vs-drowning.html
- Bridge Michigan, “Swim at your own risk. Most Michigan beaches lack lifeguards” — for the 1,220 public beaches, the 1983–1991 state park lifeguard cuts, and the Ludington and Muskegon program closures. bridgemi.com
- Bridge Michigan, “Great Lakes drownings down, marine patrol funding cut” — for the absence of statewide inland-drowning tracking and the July 2025 inland drownings. bridgemi.com
- Patterns and determinants of intentional and unintentional drowning mortality in Michigan: 2006–2024 — the 3,041 figure. Note that this study examined unintentional and intentional drowning deaths together. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41980808
- Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project, drowning statistics — 1,488 Great Lakes drownings since 2010. glsrp.org/statistics
- Washtenaw County Health Department, Public Beaches — the six beaches sampled each summer. washtenaw.org/1605/Public-Beaches
- Ann Arbor with Kids, guide to swimming lakes near Ann Arbor — the eleven lakes and beaches, and which are staffed with lifeguards. annarborwithkids.com
- USA Swimming Foundation, 5–10% Increase in Swimming Ability Among U.S. Children, 2017 study — the 79% figure. prnewswire.com
- U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts: Washtenaw County, Michigan — population, under-18 share, and poverty rate (July 1, 2025 estimate). census.gov/quickfacts
- Eastern Michigan University, Office of the President, campus message on Jones Natatorium, August 14, 2026. emich.edu
- WEMU-FM, “EMU to close Jones Natatorium, women's swim & dive teams in limbo,” August 18, 2026. wemu.org
- Michigan High School Athletic Association, Girls Swimming & Diving finals sites. mhsaa.com/sports/girls-swim-dive
- The Lenawee Voice, “Facing major structural problems, Tecumseh schools to demolish community pool,” January 19, 2026 — for the engineering findings, the three options and their costs, and the superintendent's quote. lenaweevoice.com
- Tecumseh Public Schools, community letter on the Tecumseh Community Memorial Pool, January 16, 2026 — for the November 2024 sinking fund, the $2.5 million roof allocation, and the programs the pool housed.
- Wikipedia, Canham Natatorium and Huron River (Michigan) — facility specifications, and the river's course and metroparks. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canham_Natatorium
- City of Ann Arbor, Mack Indoor Pool; Washtenaw County Parks & Recreation, Meri Lou Murray Recreation Center; and the Ann Arbor with Kids indoor pool guide, for the county pool inventory. a2gov.org