I walked out the hotel door and into the attached water park. We were in Phoenix for a volleyball tournament in June. Temperatures were averaging over 100 degrees and coming from the central mountains of Idaho (where we had yet to break 75 degrees), the sun felt like a furnace on full blast.
My twin volleyballers rushed by with their teammates and immediately began climbing the steps to the first water slide they found. That was pretty much the last I saw of them for the morning. My wife and I wandered over to the lazy river and enjoyed a relaxing float, dipping further and further into the water whenever we left the shaded areas.
Eventually, we found ourselves parked under a shady tree, catching fleeting glances of our daughters and their friends laughing, splashing, and screaming in mock-terror as they slid and swam the morning away.
Later that afternoon, on the way to their first tournament games, I marveled, once again, at the sheer power of water. From the earliest age, kids are attracted to water and no matter how old one grows, the attraction remains.
This issue is dedicated to ideas you can beg, borrow, and steal to harness the power of water more effectively for your community. As usual, all the submissions are written from people just like you—folks on the front-line of the parks and recreation world who took time to share their ideas, successes and, in some cases, failures with you.
I hope you enjoy their work. We sure enjoyed working with them to create this issue.
I hope you have a wonderful summer and get some time to spend getting your water on. I’m sure you will.
Till next month…
Rodney J. Auth
Publisher
July 2023
