Community Center Pool

This pool is great, a bit small but very well taken care of. I don’t live in the area anymore, so the prices are way to high, for one about $ 120 for a season pass and residents 85 $.

I’ve been going for years. They have improved the water temps. The showers are gross. Don’t even think about entering without shoes. You’ll surely leave with something you didn’t bring. I have never seen a locker room attendant. I don’t think they have one. Parking is good. I don’t know what the staff at the front desk does besides being well paid greeters & give out locker keys. Room for improvement.

I saw a thread posting about swim lessons recently, so I figured I should write about where I take my kids. Schumacher Natatorium is the swimming pool facility within the Park Ridge Community Center located at Centennial Park on the corner of Touhy & Western, maybe a mile west of the uptown Park Ridge neighborhood.
When my 3 year old Stunt Boy developed a love of water parks over the summer, we decided it was an opportune time to introduce him to swimming. We decided to sign him up for the 18 month-​3 year old Water Babies. The programs here run the gamut from infant Water Babies to senior citizen exercise classes.
The Park Ridge Park district really has a great facility, which is their crown jewel and their newest building. The locker room is always very clean. There’s a separate closed-​off dressing area within the locker rooms for families, in case dads bring little girls to class or moms have little boys. Lockers are free, just leave your ID at the front desk. There’s also piles of blue towels for the taking, so you don’t even need to bring your own.
There’s a big pool, with depth ranging from 3 feet to 7 feet and 4 lanes wide. Then there’s a kids’ pool with a 3′-6″ depth, a fast current area, and a shallow wading pool with a very basic water slide.
The pool itself is always the right temperature every time we’ve come –a perfect 78 degrees. And the floor around the pool is nice and balmy too, so you aren’t freezing. The lifeguards on duty keep things orderly, making sure there’s no horseplay or unsafe activities going on. A pool manager is constantly on the scene with a clipboard in hand, making sure everyone who’s got a class goes to the right place. Since multiple classes take place simultaneously at various parts of the pool (s), it’s sometimes hard to see where you belong, especially on the first day of a class. No problems here.
The instructors are great with the kids. Most of them seem to be high school age or maybe starting college. One of them has really gotten to like the Stunt Boy, who progressed from Water Babies to Preschool Paddlers to Mighty Minnows in just 3 months. Totally fearless in the water, he’s ready to do the cannonball if they would ask him to. Some of the classes allow the kids to advance to the next level as they learn within the class, like the «Learn to Swim» class my 6 year old son takes. It has 6 separate levels, with all classes taking place at the same time, just in various parts of the big pool. As kids master the needed skills, they move on to the next level.
In all, it is a really great program and I wish I had a place like that in Chicago when I was growing up, as no city park or YMCA offered this well-​organized and well-​managed swimming program.