This was to be a two-pool weekend. Our youngest son Jackson was entered with his team, the Newburgh Sea Creatures, in a meet in Louisville. Maxwell planned to stay home with his Reitz Memorial High School swim teammates in the SIAC boys sectional meet, held Saturday at the beautiful Castle High School Natatorium.
A short-lived illness kept Jackson home from Louisville, enabling the family to attend the high school boys swim sectional at CHS. It was incredibly exciting; Memorial narrowly edged out Castle with a win in the final event, the 400 Freestyle Relay – a dogfight between the teams’ anchors.
While I was glad to have seen the sectional meet, I had been looking forward to the competition in Louisville. I knew the Mary T. Meagher Aquatic Center was located in the Crescent Hill Reservoir Park and was the winter home to the Louisville Seahawks Swim Team. In July, our boys swim in the team’s summer invitational held at the Lakeside Swim Club, a private – but more like community – swim and recreation club built into a quarry in a Louisville’s charming, historic Belknap neighborhood.
It’s interesting to me that the Mary T. Meagher (now 48, she was an Olympic gold medalist and world record-holder from Louisville) Aquatic Center was built in a park with a historic reservoir.
With our plans to attend the Louisville meet altered, I turned to the web to learn more about the aquatic center, where I found this comment, among others expressing pride:
“As a lifelong swimmer, this place just makes my chest swell with pride. Louisville is a very good swimming town with more than one option for first-rate facilities. This is merely the best public swimming facility in this part of America (for) 50-meter pool, swim lessons, masters.”
I believe Louisville prizes its pools.
