JANESVILLE, Wis. — Owen Jenson and his dad, Mark, spend many summer mornings at the Rockport Pool. 

"I do swim during the school season for Craig High School, so, it keeps me in shape and it’s a lot of fun," Owen said.

What You Need To Know

  • Community pools and beaches across the country are seeing lifeguard shortages this year

  • The City of Janesville has had to restrict their two pools to certain days of availability

  • They offered a free lifeguarding course, and 10 new lifeguards took the certification class

  • The community is hopeful with those new lifeguards, more days could be added to the pools’ schedules

Saying they swim a lot of laps might be an understatement.  

“Today I was using the buoy and working more on the upper body and just did a couple thousand yards,” Owen said. “Well, around 2,000.”

This year, there is a bit of a challenge for the Jensons. The Rockport Pool has had a limited availaibility. 

“It crunched our time a lot and we try to pack our workouts in as much as we can, because the pool’s just not open as much,” Owen said. 

That limited availability is because this year, there are fewer lifeguards available to watch over the pools, not only in Janesville, but across Wisconsin and the country. 

“A typical year, we’d like to see about 30 to 35 lifeguards here between our two facilities, and right now, we have about 22,” said Janesville recreation director, Shelley Slapak. 

That’s not enough to keep the wading pool and the Rockport Pool open every day, at the same time. So, for now, the days alternate. 

A big reason there is a shortage of lifeguards is because community pools last year were closed due to COVID-19. The city has been trying to boost the number of lifeguards it has. 

“We did offer a free lifeguarding course, and we did get about 10 people who recently completed that lifeguarding course. And, we did it free, in hopes they would apply and want to work at one of our pools,” Slapak said. “And they all did.”

Now, Janesville is working to train those new lifeguards and get them into a scheduled rotation to hopefully increase the number of days the pools in the city can be open. 

That’s great news for the Jensons. 

“That’d be great, as long as we’re not stretching our lifeguards too thin and working them too hard, that’d be great,” Owen said. 

The city hasn’t finished a schedule for July, but is hopeful it can add at least one day a week for the community to cool off in the water. 

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