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CROOKSTON SPORTS CENTER STAFF TO PUT IN ICE NEXT WEEK

The Crookston Board of Parks and Recreations met on Monday afternoon inside the City Hall Conference Room. 

Review of Summer Activities/Projects

The board then began the Regular Agenda by reviewing the summer’s activities and projects. Parks and Recs Director Jake Solberg reported that the summer was full of many sports activities and projects that had been completed, including painting the inside of the hut at the Ray Ecklund Complex and installing new toilets, urinals, and sinks in both the men’s and women’s bathrooms. They had also completed the batting cages at the end of the baseball season between Diamonds 5 and 6. Solberg also noted that their summer rec programs were a great success this year, with many of the programs having more than enough children participating in them.
12u and 10u baseball each had two teams.
Baseball Cadets and Rookie League had 55 kids.
Club Kidd had 62 kids.
T-ball had 73 kids.
Tennis had 54 kids.
“Most of our swimming lessons were either maxed out or close to being maxed out throughout the summer,” Director Solberg explained. “It’s good to see kids being active and coming to our community and youth program. We had a total of 579 participants this year throughout our summer activities through Parks and Rec.” Solberg added staff had stepped up to help in many areas, such as lifeguarding. The board noted that they had seen a few kids come in from Fisher and Climax and hoped in the future to meet with Crookston School District Activities Director Nate Lubarski about creating future co-ops programs with those cities for the high school level.

Fall Activities

The board then began discussions about the upcoming fall activities, with Director Solberg saying they had opened their fall activities registration on August 1 and opened hockey registration on August 8. The board noted that numbers were slowly trickling in for fall sports as they only had 11 kids for football and would continue pushing out information on the news but believed they would receive more at the High School Back to School Day on Thursday, August 18. Solberg said he would reach out to the Greater Grand Forks Greater Football League to learn how many children were playing flag football this year. He also said that for the Crookston Sports Center, they would turn on the compressors to create ice for the Crookston Blue Line Club as they always rented out the Center in September for their sports. “The Blue Line Club is taking over the ice on September 1, so we will prepare our arena for them. So we’ll have to turn the compressors on to start the rink for them, and we’ll look at starting on Sunday, August 21, if all goes well,” said Director Solberg.

Community Pool

The board finished the meeting with discussions about the town pool. Solberg noted that they have two lifeguards, but they are losing them to fall and winter sports practices, and they would need new lifeguards to come in to keep the pool open. Vice Chair Bridgette DeLeon noted that the department should pay the lifeguards more if they wanted to recruit lifeguards from the University of Minnesota Crookston, as jobs there offered more money than what the department is offering. “We talked about hopefully trying to get some college lifeguards as the high schoolers are busy with fall programs and school, but there was a little discussion with wages,” said Director Solberg. “We start at $12 an hour, and tonight, there was mention that UMC starts at $15 an hour, so you have to keep up with the competitiveness. There was some discussion about the wage differential, but we can’t do anything about that until we get our budget approved, but it’s something to look at for the future, and maybe we can raise our wages for starting pay.” Solberg noted there were chemical issues in the pool again last week, but they weren’t bad enough to shut down the pool. He said that he has been checking it every day in the morning to help maintain it and looks to continue monitoring it to keep it open. Solberg also mentioned that the Crookston Swim Team had begun co-oping with Fosston at the Community Pool and had begun using it for practices starting today and will use them every day from 4:15 to 6:00 p.m. with their swim meets being held in Fosston, though noting they could be held here as well.

The next Parks and Recreations board meeting will take place on Monday, September 19, at 4:45 p.m. inside the Crookston City Hall Conference Room.

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