Nick Consonery

I am a self-described YMCA super-user with two kids at Rainbow Station, a full family membership, and I participate in the Masters swim program. I'm at the Y five to six days a week.

I'm writing to ask that you please help us keep Valles and continue investing in the aquatics program and facilities rather than scaling them back. My family and I absolutely love the New Canaan Y, and the pools are especially important to us.

I am from South Carolina, where swimming is readily accessible for most kids and many neighborhoods even have their own swim teams. We moved to Connecticut in 2016, and while we love it here, one major challenge in Fairfield County is the lack of pools. We live in Norwalk, where there are no public pools or YMCAs. We don't belong to a country club or private pool, so the only places to take our two boys swimming near us are the YMCAs in New Canaan or Darien. It would be a huge loss for the area to lose an entire pool when access is already so limited.

Over the past three years, I've been an active participant in the Masters program. The program was languishing a bit a few years ago, but several things changed. A few members really leaned into coaching and welcoming new swimmers. Some of us actively recruited friends and other swimmers to join. And to the Y's great credit, staff brought in amazing coaches who completely re-energized the program. We now regularly fill Valles with 14–16 swimmers during routine Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning practices, and often more than that on Sundays.

I'm not sure whether some of the accomplishments of our swimmers are widely known. One of our regular members is ranked in the top ten nationally in the men's 50 and 100 freestyle events in the 60–64 age group this year. Another has solo-completed Swim the Sound, the 20 Bridges Swim around New York City, the 20-mile Catalina swim, and the 40-mile SCAR open-water swim, and is now training to swim the English Channel. Others are former Division I college swimmers, and one competed at Cal and participated in Olympic trials. For a recreational swimmer like me, it is amazing to be able to swim alongside people like this. There is so much more potential to build around this community.

When I look at Valles today, I see both a great pool and a missed opportunity. The local community needs more pools, not fewer. If Valles is underutilized, that seems solvable through stronger engagement with New Canaan and even Norwalk to build more community aquatic programming and get more people swimming. Maybe it needs some improvements, but the facility could eventually host competitive swim events across age groups and would be a great venue for an annual US Masters meet.

If we lose the Valles Pool, the impact will extend well beyond simply losing the larger pool itself. It will also reduce availability in the Forese Pool, since more programs and swimmers will be competing for less space. The already limited family swim opportunities for parents like me to bring our kids will shrink even further. It's hard to imagine the Masters program continuing in its current form if school groups and Masters swimmers can no longer both use the mornings.

I would personally be very interested in being part of a constructive solution and would gladly volunteer my time to help keep Valles — to help shape and implement a capital campaign, for example, or contribute my time and energy in whatever other ways would help us reach an outcome that not only preserves the pools but allows us to invest in them so they become an even more valuable community asset.