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Latest — Nov 26, 2025

November 26, 2025: You operate a business, not (just) a pool

Happy Wednesday & Happy Thanksgiving to our US subscribers. A few weeks ago, a journalist from PoolPro contacted me about an article she was writing: what do pool professionals do to fill their time during the off-season? After redirecting her to someone in a Southern US state where outdoor pools

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November 19, 2025: IAAPA Expo

Greetings from the IAAPA Expo in Orlando! I planned to attend every other year (because it's a 15-hour trek to Florida from Calgary), but a number of factors conspired to bring me again this year, and I'm very happy to be here! The week started off

November 12, 2025: a mentality of mediocrity

Greetings, Have you ever had a regular customer complain that you're ignoring them in favour of seeking out new customers? I used to hear this all the time when I was a municipal pool manager. The aquafitters (i.e. seniors at the pool 5x per week) would complain

November 5, 2025: Circle of control vs. circle of concern

Greetings, For this week's opinion portion of the newsletter, I have several ideas and trends I've seen & heard since we chatted last week. These fall both within your circle of control (things you can do at your aquatic facility) and circle of concern (things you

October 29, 2025: World Waterpark Association (WWA) Show

Greetings, I'm obviously coming to you a week late. I should have planned to skip last week's newsletter (October 22), but the reality is I wasn't anticipating how busy I'd be at the annual World Waterpark Association (WWA) Conference & Tradeshow at

October 15, 2025: Sexual harassment in aquatics survey

Greetings, If you've worked in aquatics for any length of time, you know that you can arrive at work thinking your day will go in one direction, and it ends up going in completely another! Every day is entertainment, and rather than fight it, here's my

October 9, 2025: Reasonable suspicion

Good Morning, If you've been here a while, you might recall a newsletter I wrote earlier this year entitled Should have known, or ought to have known. To build on that concept, I was recently reading a legal settlement about a child who wasn't removed from

October 1, 2025: Industrial drowning fatalities

Good Morning, and welcome to October. Does your facility do any special programming for Thanksgiving (Canada) or Halloween? Now is the time to think about these things, if you haven't already. In other news, some weeks the news in our industry has no apparent theme, but this week

September 25, 2025: Workplace assessment tools

Good Morning, I've spent the last five days in Fort Lauderdale for the Pool & Hot Tub Alliance (PHTA) Certified Pool Operator (CPO) Instructor School. I'm one of a dozen instructor trainers (ITs) who rotate through facilitating 1-2 classes per year to train new CPO instructors.

September 18, 2025: Women in the Surf Park industry

Happy, er, Thursday? ICYMI: we've moved this weekly newsletter from Fridays to Wednesdays permanently as of yesterday. (Our last newsletter was sent on Friday, September 5, and our next newsletter will be sent on Wednesday, September 24.) I'm sending this week's newsletter on Thursday