Behind the Scenes: Feb ‘23
You might be forgiven for thinking that less goes on during the shortest month of the year. Well, at Atlantis – we find February packs even more into its fewer days than a normal month! Read on to find out some of what this month held in store for your community health and leisure centre:
Winter Warmer participants take part in one of the project’s crafting sessions
Swimming at Atlantis - ‘an update from poolside’
Atlantis is currently in the middle of running an in-house Scottish Swimming Teacher Qualification. This involves the training and upskilling of seven people, who by the end of the course will be able to support the delivery of Scottish Swimming’s National Framework. Our very own Rebecca MacKinnon is a Scottish Swimming Tutor, which means she is qualified to educate and assess adults and therefore able to work with course candidates who have different levels of availability. Rebecca previously ran our Learn to Swim programme for 12 years, before handing the baton to Emma D’Arcy.
Under Emma’s supervision, Oban Swim School is currently providing swimming lessons to over 600 children a week. The programme guides young people of all stages, including babies, to club ready swimmers. Once swimmers are deemed competent to leave the programme, they do so as ‘life-long’ swimmers. The skills developed in the programme also allow children to transition to Oban’s local competitive swimming club, Oban Otters. Atlantis has had a strong relationship with Oban Otters over the years and always suggest that children give the club a try. The club is a brilliant environment to reenforce skills and contributes to their success at being technically strong lifelong swimmers. Along the way they gain the brilliant social experience of being a valued member of a local community sports club.
Centre Life - ‘know your building’
The last month saw continued works as part of our planned maintenance and building improvement programme. In particular, February saw us advance the installation of a brand-new Building Management System (BMS). This is essentially the brain of our building, capable of monitoring a variety of systems we use to make Atlantis work. The new BMS will give us increased control and efficiency due to everything being controlled by thermostats rather than time clocks. This is good news because time clocks don’t consider things like environmental conditions and are a set device that needs to be changed manually. Instead, our new thermostatic system will control systems in relation to the environmental conditions. The new BMS will not only give us more control but also vastly reduce fault finding times as these will be flagged on a new interface that distils all the relevant into one handy place. What’s more, the new BMS will be fully accessible remotely - giving us better and faster information if a problem occurs out of hours.
Elsewhere in the building we continued with our toilet flooring improvement project. Last month we told you about renewing the Café W/C facilities, this month it was the turn of the dry-side W/Cs – now all renewed and freshened up!
Staff News - ‘the team behind the action’
It’s been another busy month for the staff team, particularly when it comes to athletics and gymnastics training. Emily and Hannah are both doing their Level 1 Gymnastics while Kirsty and Shannon are in the midst of their CPD Training in Preschool Gymnastics. In athletics, Emily, Lora and Hannah are getting underway with their Level 1 awards. Well done everybody!
Winter Warmer Project - ‘increasing Atlantis’ impact in our community’
The Winter Warmer project entered its second to last month this month, with fantastic community engagement along the way. Such was the enthusiastic uptake of the services offered by the project that we had to make the decision to cap additional membership applications to the bespoke Winter Warmer membership. This is a temporary membership that gives access to certain areas of the Centre during specific off-peak times. The Winter Warmer Project is made possible due to Scottish Government funding, therefore its associated membership only runs until next month, when the funding comes to an end. The project has worked hard to come alongside those in our community that are struggling with the increasing socio-economic pressures affecting so many. As the Winter Warmer comes to a close over the next few weeks, we will be investigating ways in which Atlantis can continue to support the work that the project has demonstrated is so needed in our local community.