I was the Asst Manager last year and personally felt we did a great job. Even better than in the summer of '98 when our lifeguarding staff was put to the ultimate test with a total of about 22 rescues.

However, from what I've heard, many residents don't feel like we did the best we could do. What do you all think we did wrong? We, the guards from '99 would love to hear it.

The following was posted under another thread, but several people encouraged me to start this as a new topic:

As a member of the pool staff for the past three summers I can say that it is very hard to please everyone in the neighborhood. You may be able to please one person, but your decision may disappoint several others. It would be very helpful if the residents realize how hard all of us at the community center and pool try to please the residents. However, we get more criticism than praise.

I have heard that residents felt our guards last year were not attentive enough, and didn't place enough staff in the guard chairs. However, as one of the managing guards, I can assure you our guards WERE attentive. Each and everyone of us maintained the "10/20 zone of protection" that we are trained to do. We all scanned our zones within ten seconds continuously, and had we recognized a situation, would have been able to reach a distressed swimmer within 20 seconds. As far as putting guards in chairs, whenever the social pool had more than 25 swimmers, another guard was put up. There were weekends when all the lifeguard chairs were put to use, and a roving lifeguard was assigned to the "beach" area of the social pool. Effective lifeguard coverage was not an issue in our eyes.

Another comment made to me was that for this upcoming summer, the residents want guards to go through customer service training. What most don't realize is that customer service training, and dealing with patrons is in the American Red Cross Lifeguard Training course that we all take to become certified. We have all had the training, and try to be as helpful as possible. We DO take our jobs seriously, and the 35+ hours we spend in ARC Lifeguard Training is very comprehensive. Personally, I will not be returning to Kentlands this summer, but if anyone wishes to respond with questions or criticisms, I would love to hear it. We, the staff, felt last summer was one of the better ones we've had.

-- Scott Tanzi (Scott3085@hotmail.com), March 15, 2000