On the Job with the Aquatic Center

The Bulletin spoke with Brian Dulgar, director of the Aquatic Center.

What do people think you do?
“They think that the Aquatic Center is a swimming pool. They think we teach swim lessons, lifeguarding and those sorts of things.”

What do you really do?
“We provide everything other than swim lessons. We offer rowing, wakeboarding, waterskiing, sailing, windsurfing, canoeing, kayaking, youth and adult programs, equipment rentals and special events.”

Describe your office.
“We are mostly staffed by Sac State students, but we also have a core staff that’s there year after year. The core staff, which has many years of experience, teaches and mentors the new staff that come in, and they are full of enthusiasm and good ideas. So it’s a terrific mix.”

What surprises people?
“We’re always changing, whether it’s programming or our group of activities. People are really amazed at how we can run so many programs simultaneously.  We are truly a multi-use facility. Because of our physical location and our resources, we can really tailor plans that meet the needs of a customer, such as group reservations and instruction to team-building exercises to different kinds of rowing events.”

What’s your biggest challenge?
“Challenges are really opportunities waiting to be discovered. Right now our challenge is working with a depleted state budget. We have to ask ourselves, ‘how do you make a viable program pay for itself when you depend on outside funding sources?’ But I treat that as an opportunity to implement programming with the resources we have. We service more than 15,000 people a year, so it’s a matter of pooling our resources, relying on feedback, and working together. Our core staff has many years of experience, so discovering the opportunities among the challenges has become something we get proficient at. For example, two days before the rowing championship, a lot of water was released from Folsom Lake and our docks broke. We made a game of seeing who could fix the docks the fastest, and two days later, we finished in time for the NCAA to inspect and approve the facilities. They did. If anything can go wrong, we’ve experienced it, so we know how to fix it.”

What do you get asked the most?
“Where are the bathrooms?”