City of Windsor, Ontario Creates Family Friendly Accessible Experience with New Water Play Features

August 23, 2010

“In the past, those pools never reached capacity,” says Carri-Belle Murphy, Supervisor of Community Programming for Outdoor Pools and Beach. “Now, the two pools with the play features have reached capacity over 10 times this summer.”

According to Murphy, the City of Windsor, in lower Ontario, hadn’t updated any of its pools for 12 years and many are over 20 years old. When she decided to overhaul two pools at once, she knew there were some changes and amenities that she wanted to add.

“When I would travel around and look at our six outdoor pools, I noticed that the deep ends were always empty or there were just a few kids playing in them,” she says. “I wanted to create a more family friendly, accessible experience with surface areas that allow more ages to play.”

She also knew that she wanted to add floatable and attached play elements.

“I went down into the States to look at pools and when I saw the PLAYTIME water features at Cedar Point, Ohio, I said, ‘I want those in my pool!’”

Windsor opted to completely remove two existing pool tanks and install new tanks. The first pool has a zero-depth beach entry and gradually achieves a maximum depth of five feet. There are several play elements, including snake and alligator floatables. In the beach entry, they added a starfish and a turtle, both bolted down. There are also two deck-mounted flowers that spray water into the pool.

The second pool also has a zero-depth beach entry with crab and turtle bolt-downs. The pool drops to 5 ½ feet where they added snake and alligator floatables, as well.

“The reaction has been fantastic!” says Murphy. “We have six outdoor pools in Windsor and in July we had over 20,000 people come to recreational swims.”

Murphy believes the Windsor pools are some of the first in the lower Canadian area to offer PLAYTIME water features and she’s happy to introduce them to her city’s children.

“Unless they’ve ventured into Ohio, I doubt they’ve seen anything like this before,” says Murphy. “They absolutely love climbing on them, resting on them, falling off of them.”

Murphy likes the water elements so much that she hopes to offer the PLAYTIME experience to future preschoolers.

“What I’d really like to do in the future,” Murphy dreams, “if I ever find some space, I want to create a preschool play area with PLAYTIME elements.”