Neck-Deep in Rules at the Pool

Safety, Liability Concerns Put a Lid on Summer Fun

On a hot summer noon at the Martin Luther King Jr. pool in Silver Spring, there is so much whistling in the air it sounds like a bird-filled rainforest at sunset. A very rule-oriented rainforest.

Tweet. "No hanging on the sides!"

Tweet tweet. "No running!"

Tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet. "One bounce!"

"Man, you can't do anything," groused a drenched and chastened teenage boy who had just been whistled for taking an extra spring on the diving board at the popular swim park run by the Montgomery County Department of Recreation.

Next to the board, fastened to a chain-link fence, is a list of diving do's and don'ts. Another placard catalogues 14 rules governing behavior on the Lazy River float pool. More prohibitions are posted next to the water slides, the lap lanes and the baby pool. In all, swimming at MLK pool is governed by almost 90 rules and regs, according to its Web site, from No Spitting Water to No Prolonged Underwater Swimming.

This is the age of the Swim Commandments. At county, municipal, apartment and community pools all over the region, the lists of summertime Thou Shalt Nots continue to grow. Where a few basics such as no running and a catch-all warning against horseplay used to suffice, pool managers say they are under increasing pressure from insurance companies, lawyers and swim patrons themselves to forbid more and more specific behavior.

"We get feedback from the insurance company every August," said David Greenleaf, longtime manager of Parkland Community Pool in Silver Spring. "They tell us that such and such an accident happened somewhere, that somebody was sued for this somewhere else, and they'd like us to consider updating our rules. You can't enumerate everything, but I think they'd like us to."

As a result, prohibitions ranging from the obvious to the perplexing are posted at pools throughout the Washington region, including rules against eating in the pool water, swimming while suffering from diarrhea, wearing long pants near the pool (even non-swimmers) and "excessive breath holding."

"We used to rely a lot more on common sense," said Greg York, manager of the Overlee Community Pool in Arlington County and River Falls Swim Club in Potomac. "Now you have to have it written down. I think it takes away a lot of the fun for the kids."

The frequent whistles from the lifeguard stand can make an afternoon at the pool no day at the beach, relaxation-wise. Molly Galvin, a Takoma Park mother of two, said her family and several others with young children resigned their memberships at Daleview Pool in Silver Spring because of what they saw as a culture of enforcement.

"We used to call them the pool Nazis," Galvin said. "They would literally yell at the moms if their kids were more than a few inches outside of arm's length. It was so strict, it just wasn't a fun environment."