By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
At the special workshop meeting of the Brandon School Board, Mike Kavanaugh of AQUA Club addressed the board and shared the upcoming goals for the next few years.
“Growth is something that’s very, very important to us and actually that’s always our number one goal, the more people in the community we can reach through swimming, that keeps them safe,” he said. “There’s a lot of water in this state.”
Currently, Brandon Schools and AQUA Club are still in contract negotiations, since the two year contract is up in June, but are confident they can continue to work together.
“We’re looking to keep the same rates for our tuition and schedule, our goal is to be able to get the best of swimming,” said Kavanaugh. “In 2017 we had just over 1,500 swim lessons taught, last year we’ve done 2,200 swim lessons, and we’re looking to be at about 2,500 this year.”
In the presentation, Kavanaugh listed priorities in classes for kids, and making safety for students a priority.
“Our ratios are actually one [instructor] to three [students], which is the lowest in the entire country,” he said. “We love what we do, we’re very, very passionate about swimming, and our goal is to be able to pass that love of swimming into all the communities that we’re a part of.”

The board also said they were pleased with the programming AQUA has handled.
“Back when we looked at the different opportunities which led us to AQUA Club, our goal really was to try and find a better utilization of our pool resource, and we didn’t feel we had the resources to do it ourselves, man power, financial or otherwise,” said board member Kevin McClellen. “So in finding AQUA Club, our ultimate goal was to try and keep that pool full, used and occupied. We also recognized that is also the best thing for the pool as well, so in order to preserve our resource, our resource needs to be used. And I think that so far this relationship has gone very well as far as accomplishing the goals.”
For full AQUA Club programing, visit aquaswimclub.com