FAQ General Questions

To be included on the Swimmers Guide website, a pool:

1. Should be at least 18 meters (59.1 feet) long; (Exceptions);
2. Should be open for at least eight full months of the year; (Exceptions);
3. Should be accessible to the general public on a "drop-in", "casual", or "punctual" basis, by membership, through a reciprocal arrangement with affiliated facilities, or by arrangement between the facility and one or more local hotels.) (Exceptions);
4. We won’t list a pool that meets all of the above criteria, unless we know its:
   • Name;
   • Street address;
   • City or town, state or province (if applicable); county or region (if applicable), and country; and
   • Area or city code (if used in the country) and telephone number for general inquiries about the pool’s hours, programs, prices, etc.(Exceptions)

We may exclude pools that meet the listing criteria but have such limited public access hours (a couple of hours a day on only a few days a week), that they’d simply clutter-up the database.

We used to exclude facilities that otherwise qualified for a listing because the water in the pool was kept too warm for anything resembling "real" swimming. We've eased off that restriction because we want people who like warm water pools to go to warm water pools, leaving the cold water pools to more serious swimmers. If someone who likes warm water pools comes to the site and can find only cold water pools, s/he's likely to "bite the bullet" and tie up a lane in a good, cold pool - annoying the serious swimmers there and having an unhappy swim of his or her own, too.

The principal reason for limiting the number of facilities on the site is to keep the database manageable in size and useful throughout the year. Most hotels and many health clubs have "swimming pools", but many of them are too small to swim in. We think that anything shorter than 15 meters is too short for lap swimming. (We call them "Einstein Pools" – keeping track of the number of laps to get in a mile or kilometer long swim gets you into higher mathematics.)

And just about every city and town in the temperate zones has at least one outdoor, seasonal, swimming pool – most are open from May to September in the Northern Hemisphere or from November through March in the Southern Hemisphere. We’ve read that there are over 200,000 public pools in the United States, alone. If we included all those pools, the database would become extremely large and cluttered with listings that are of no use to anyone for 50 – 75% of the year. Searching the database for a pool that’s open in the "off-season" would become a tedious and annoying process.

It is our experience that finding a good public pool in summer is relatively easy; even non-swimmers in most communities know where the local public pool can be found. But finding a good pool after the summer is over is a another question. The primary purpose of the site and database is to help swimmers find pools where they can swim whatever the season.

Finally, we have a lot of pools to keep track of here. We spend our days going through the listings in an orderly fashion in an attempt the review each and every one of them periodically. The first time we did it, a full review of every listing took about four years. We're now in our sixth year of the second round of reviews, with about another year or two to go. We're working as fast as we can, but adding a few hundred thousand listings to the site would make it impossible to ever finish a single review of every listing.

The decision as to whether or not a facility will be included or excluded from the site is solely that of the site’s editor, Bill Haverland. If he decides to put a pool into the database, it goes in; if he decides not to include a pool, it doesn’t go in. It’s that simple. Pool operators and swimmers don’t get a vote. Whether the owner of a pool likes it or not, if Bill thinks a pool should be listed, he lists it; If he thinks it shouldn’t be listed, it doesn’t get listed.

We started developing the database for publication in a book about pools in the United States in 1992. From 1992 through 1995, we mailed questionnaires to thousands of YMCAs, health clubs, hotels, and municipal pools across the country, and published the results in two editions of a book called "Swimmers Guide". The second edition had 3,200 listings, all in the United States. Those pools formed the core of the database.

In 1996, we discovered the Internet and started using it as a tool for research. We began learning the ins-and-outs of the various search engines back then, progressing from the original Internet search engines Magellan, Web-Crawler, and Northern Lights, to AltaVista and AllTheWeb.com. Now, we use Google and Google Maps almost exclusively.

We first searched in English only, then expanded to Spanish and Portuguese, which we studied in college; then we then learned to use other languages we’d never studied. We’ve done searches in Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovakian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish, to name a few. (Special thanks to the Google Translate website!)

The languages that aren’t written in the Latin alphabet are difficult for us to deal with – but we've still been able to gather a fair number of listings in China, Greece, Israel, Japan, Russia, and Thailand, among others.

We’ve figured out how to use a variety of Web-based telephone books to find addresses and telephone numbers of pools where we had only names, and to use the telephone numbers in search engines to find their dimensions, addresses, and other critical information.

And, while working with the search engines on our own, we’ve also received information for hundreds of listings from other swimmers who used the "Add a Pool" tool on the site.

There is no charge for a facility, a club, or a team to be listed on the Swimmers Guide website.

This page was last updated on April 14, 2020.