COLUMBUS, Ohio — A chemically-treated trampoline park foam pit, laser tag without vests, and pools without Marco Polo – these are of some of the changes patrons will notice as recreation facilities in Ohio reopen with limited capacity after nearly three months of closure under the state’s COVID-19 plan.  

The list of venues permitted to reopen Wednesday included skating rinks, laser tag arenas, movie theaters, outdoor playgrounds, and trampoline parks, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced on June 4.

Amusement parks and water parks will follow with reopenings set for June 19.

Recreation venue owners said they are following the state’s requirements and recommendations for reopening: enforcing six feet distancing, spacing lines with floor markings, checking employees’ temperatures, requiring staff to wear facial coverings, and sanitizing high-contact surfaces.

But the state’s guidance does not delve into particulars of operating requirements for niche businesses like laser tag venues. Owners said that leaves them in an uncertain position without clarity as to what is allowed, and they reported difficulties contacting state officials for more information.

Trisha Rich, a small business owner who operates the Bounce Club, a trampoline park in Powell, took a chance and resumed operation of its trampoline fitness classes after Ohio’s gyms, pools, and bowling alleys got the green light to open on May 26. 

“I started those classes back up to bring in some revenue, because when the gyms said they were open, well, I think my fitness classes fall into the gym category,” she said. “I had no idea: Am I going to get written up? Are they going to fine me? Luckily nothing happened, but it was a guessing game.”

Rich has determined that dodgeball games at her trampoline park will have to remain on pause due to the state’s rules on sports equipment. She is able to reopen the foam pit, but not without additional expenses. She has hired a company to spray each piece of foam with a chemical designed to keep surfaces sanitized for 30 days.

How do you remove hundreds of foam pieces from a foam pit? By hand, she said.

“It’s a nightmare. It’s definitely time consuming, but we are taking all the possible measures to get back open and to make it a safe place for people to come, so they want to come out and so they can know that we’ve gone above and beyond to clean and sanitize.”

The president of Coliseum X, a locally-owned Columbus laser tag venue that reopened Wednesday, said he felt left in the dark through the closure.

“When somebody turns off your income for two and half months and won’t tell you when it’s going to start again, that’s very difficult, and not just for the owners, but for every employee who works here,” David Carline said. “As a business we’ve been open for four years. We’ve now been shut down for nearly three months. So it’s been extremely difficult. That’s zero income coming in – we can’t do online sales, or curbside pick-up, or any of those types of things.”

Coliseum X is capping its games at 24 players, reduced from its normal max of 60 players, Carline said. His inventory includes seven types of guns, but for now players will choose from the four types of guns that can receive tags without players having to use wearable vests for tagging.

Temporarily ditching pistols and shotguns, which lack sensors, and putting the vests in storage means one less piece of gear to sanitize between games, he said. The new style of play will require a bit more marksmanship, but the feedback from test games they ran with family and friends has been positive, he said.

Carline is “relieved” to reopen, but he would not call it a feeling of “excitement” given the challenges that still lie ahead with limited capacity and extra requirements. To his surprise, the calls he has received from customers are not inquiries about safety steps, rather, they are from customers wanting assurance that Coliseum X will not require masks. Customers will not have to wear them, he said with a smile.

“There’s relief being able to open, but the fact of the matter is we’re still at 50 percent capacity, and I am going to have to staff more people to control some of the different elements,” he said. “We’re going to be hurting for a long time.”

Rich’s trampoline business is her passion. She teaches classes and trains athletes, and she is looking forward to providing active entertainment for her customers, particularly children with way too much energy from being cooped up at home. She was thrilled to open the doors Wednesday, but she said reopening with limited capacity during an ongoing pandemic brings its own set headaches for owners of businesses like hers.

At 50 percent capacity, only about 45 jumpers can use the trampolines at a time. Her staff will have to close off areas of the trampoline park for 30 minutes at a time every half hour to disinfect surfaces with a large weed sprayer, corralling bouncers back-and-forth between the two sides of the park throughout the day. And she can only host one private party per hour instead of two. Those parties are the moneymakers for her businesses, she said.

“It’s been very rough. We were the first to close and last to open, so we took the worst hit,” Rich said. “It’s definitely more expensive to operate with extra staff to clean and with costs of supplies. And everything is also cut in half, so we won’t make as much revenue.”

The capacity limits are hard on her employees too, she said.

“They’re waiting like ‘Am I going to work today? Am I getting cut short? Am I going to get enough hours to pay my bills?” she said.

For indoor recreation venues, the mid-March to early-June closure meant missing out on a big chunk of their busy seasons, owners said. They are reopening their doors in the summer when lots of families prefer outdoor recreation.

For seasonal attractions like outdoor waterparks, the timing of the closure hurts too, as they have already lost a month or more of an otherwise short season.

Zoombezi Bay, a large waterpark owned by the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, will reopen at around 20 to 25 percent capacity on Friday, June 19.

Vice president for the waterpark Anthony Sabo said the park has added extra evening operating hours in the back end of the season to add some value for its season pass holders who missed out on the early season.

Sabo said his team has rearranged all of its lounge chairs into what they are calling “pods,” spaced out groups of two or four chairs. Guests will be expected to maintain distance from other groups in the lounge areas, in the pools, and in-line for the waterslides. Team members will walk around sanitizing surfaces, and at night the park will get a deep clean with backpack sprayers.

A few features cannot be reopened, he said. In the park’s “Baboon Lagoon” play structure area, the difficult to clean “Cargo Crossing” will stay closed, and the tipping buckets that dump water on park-goers‘ heads will be disabled to prevent crowding.

The upside? The limited capacity means that even on a hot Saturday afternoon guests will not have to wait in long lines for their favorite waterslides, Sabo said.

“Once you sit down in that lounge chair, and just kick back and relax, it’s going to be very similar to the way it was before, and it’s still going to be a really great, fun experience and a really safe experience as well,” he said.

Sabo stressed that the chlorine in the water will help stop the spread of germs, as did Debbie McLaughlin, parks and recreation director for Upper Arlington, which will soon reopen two of its three pools but has opted to keep its pool with a waterpark closed for the season.

Her team determined that this summer’s patronage may only warrant the reopening of two pools, and they realized that they only had the staff to open two of them given the extra employees needed to clean and monitor the pool areas. Of the three pools, Reed Road Water Park made the most sense to keep shuttered, she said.

“With Reed Road, because it has play features, large slides, and climbing features that would all have had to be closed, we didn’t want families to come to the pool and have kids be disappointed that they can’t use those facilities,” McLaughlin said. “So we decided to open the two pools where families can have a positive experience.”

Upper Arlington’s Tremont and Devon pools will operate four 2-hour shifts per day at a capacity of 100 people, with a 30 minute break in between each shift for cleaning. The first two time slots at Tremont pool sold out in a few hours, she said.

The diving boards will be open, with staff wiping down the handrails regularly. The boards, on the other hand, cannot be sanitized. Kids would slip, McLaughlin said.

Guests will be required to wear masks when entering and exiting the facility, but not when they are in the pool.

Patrons will have to decide their own comfort levels with the safety steps that officials like McLauglin have implemented.

Dina Graham, a Columbus resident and mother of a 3-year-old daughter said she was still deciding whether swimming lessons for her kid would be safe.

“I’m sort of on the fence about swimming lessons, but we may cautiously start trying things this summer,” she said.

Justin Andrews, a Gahanna resident and parent of a 9-year-old, Tej, said his family will not be rushing out to amusement or water parks.

“It’s about balancing risk vs. reward. We’ll go out and do it for something he really loves like soccer, but we would only make it out to an amusement park probably  once per year, so it’s not a priority right now.”

Tej, who was coming from a workout with his soccer trainer, said he is ready to get back to the pitch with other players.

“I’m looking forward to when it’s deeper in the summer, and we can play more games,” he said. “I’m really excited to be able to play with other people again.”

Owners are confident the demand for recreation is there.

Carline thinks his customers are dying to come out and shoot each other with laser guns again.

“I’m optimistic that people are tired of the quarantine and they want to get out and do things,” he said. “There seems to be some pent up demand for people to want to get out. And that’s a good thing for a business like ours.”