I swim at the local university pool, it has a 14’ diving well with a three meter board. Unfortunately the only people who get to use the boards at the dive team.
Where I grew up the nearest public pool to take lessons at was over 20 miles from our home. Same for lakes, none near by, just ponds and creeks which are nasty things to swim in. Except for rich folks no one had real pools back then in our area and most of those were only 3 foot deep kiddie pools. I would have learned to swim in college when I got out into the world; had it not been for the assholes throwing me in. Near death experiences tend to have severe reactions on people.
I only learned to swim at 48 because I started doing water aerobics due to tendentious and pulled muscles from running and lifting weights. Once I overcame the fear of just being in the water it became easy to swim. Still don’t care for the deep end; five foot is enough to swim in.
You want deep? You can’t handle the deep.
Unless you go to Belgium!
In India, deep handles YOU!
I’m 39 and don’t know how to swim…
The town that I grew up in Wisconsin had a municipal outdoor pool built during the Depression years that was shallow at both ends (3’), medium deep in the middle (6’ maybe?), then a 12’ diving well extending from the middle with two 1 meter diving boards and a 3 meter “high dive”. (Well, maybe 3 yards, or whatever system they built diving boards to in the 30’s). It also had a concrete starting block at one of the shallow ends, surely an insurance nightmare by the eighties. I remember even thinking about getting up on the block would get you tossed out of the pool. It was built to host swim meets, and my parents said it held pretty major regional AAU (or the 1960s swimming equivalent) meets into their childhoods.
The pool got massively rebuilt in the 1990s and looks nothing like it used to. It has water slides instead of diving boards, it has a walk out shallow end and the deepest part probably isn’t more than 5 feet. Both the town high school and the local Y have indoor pools with diving wells in them so there really was no more need to have a deep end anymore for the local swim teams, and I’m sure it is cheaper to insure!
My school district didn’t have a pool. Plans for one were drawn up when the high school was built 40 yrs ago, but they opted for shop classrooms (including a garage for auto shop). Then in the early '90s when the attached middle school was built there were plans for a shared pool, but the board opted for a clocktower (which is why both sets of lockerrooms open into a huge empty courtyard). From what I’ve heard most of the districts in the region that do have pools have now closed them for budgetary reasons. I learned to swim at home and at the YMCA when I was very young. My grandparents had an indoor pool and my parents later got an above ground one.
No more deep ends? That sucks. Some of the best times I had when I was a teenager were hanging out at the pool with my friends. My best friend used to do all kinds of trick dives and all the little kids used to love watching her. We used to move the fulcrum to make the board more springy, and the lifeguards didn’t even care. (Well, we knew most of them from school, or they were older siblings of friends)
I just looked up my local pool, and it seems they still have the diving board, thank god. (In fact, it looks like they’ve added more since the last time I was there!)
Besides, it isn’t like you need deeper water in which to drown – you can certainly drown in five feet of water. Hell, you can drown in an inch of water, technically.
I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. My mother grew up on a Wisconsin farm in the '30’s and never really learned to swim, so when she raised her children out in California (where I believe it is pretty standard for high schools to have pools that offer summer programs for younger kids), she was adamant that we all take swimming lessons every summer, beginning around first grade, until we passed “Advanced”. She never said, but I think she was afraid we’d drown and she wouldn’t be able to save us. Where you can swim outdoors even in winter (if your gym teacher makes you, anyway), I guess pools are more of a school fixture.
I really don’t like swimming in pools any more. Too many chemicals. Rivers and lakes for me (exceptions being those amazing pools I posted about up thread).
My small city (~5k) just got a new pool. It has a deep end - there is both a 1M and a 3M diving board, and a climbing wall (which is hard to climb because you are wet and it leans out over the pool). I know it is 11’ near the climbing wall.
We also got two water slides, but it is only 3’ 6" deep there.
Brian
Can you have a pool without a deep end and still have starting blocks? I remember when using starting blocks that you would go a decent way into the water if you wanted to.
Olympic pool standards are 2 meter depth minimum and often go deeper. I imagine that most pools used for competition use the Olympic standard or close to it. Six and half minimum qualifies as deep end for me; in fact the whole thing is deep.
The new YMCA pool in my hometown (2nd one in the building) that was built in the 1980s had starting blocks in the shallow end. Thinking the shallow end was 4 feet, because it wasn’t “up to the waist” shallow, but you could still stand easily as a kid. The deep end had a movable walkway to adjust the length of the lap section of the pool and separated it from the diving well. I used the blocks during swimming lessons but during open swim lifeguards would throw you out if you got up on them. I remember I used to scrap my chest half the time, and the instructors put the fear in God to us about being careful to protect our heads and necks.
So far, I don’t believe my local pool has been renovated to remove the deep end, though I haven’t been there in a while, anyways. It’s just not something they are likely to spend money on. Few people around here are in the “save money by spending money” wave of thought.
Wouldn’t it be ironic that in trying to make pools safer by having no deep end we significantly increase the number of serious head and neck injuries? Many people like to dive in water. Most people have enough sense to do it in the deep end. But if there isn’t one it will be in the shallower water and thats not as safe.
Also, this no deep end business might make more people afraid of the water. Yeah you can learn to swim in water you can stand up in. But you are less likely to do so or feel the need to do. And even if you do learn to swim, water over your head is still gonna be a bit scary because you’ve never/rarely actual staked you life on your ability to swim.
And durn it I like deep ends. And not for the diving board. I just liked swimming around down there. I hate to see them go 
My in-laws have a pool with a deep end. The pool isn’t deep enough to dive in, so the deep end is mostly a nuisance that makes it impossible to stand up in half the pool.
That might not be an entirely bad thing. According to the CDC, about 3500 Americans drown every year. We should be at least as afraid of drowning as we are of terrorism.
I would think being able to swim (or swim better) would take care of at least some of those deaths.