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Remember when public pools had actual diving boards? Those were banned everywhere by 1995.
I grew up in Toledo and we had a 10-foot board at the community pool. You could do cannonballs off it all day. Then some insurance company decided they were too dangerous and every pool in the city ripped them out by the summer of 94. Now kids just splash around in 4 feet of water with a water slide that costs $8 extra. I get that safety matters but the joy of flying through the air for 2 seconds was worth the risk. Has anyone else seen a diving board at a public pool since the 90s?
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rowanellis14d ago
Hold up, those rubber mats weren't meant for jumping off, they were just for padding under slides and stuff. I remember my old pool tried putting one in after shoving the board to the side, and some kid still tried to cannonball off it and just bounced sideways into the concrete. It took them two summers to finally just put in a proper slide.
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knight.mason16d ago
You remember those big red boards with the metal springs? My buddy Dave broke his collarbone on one back in ‘92 at the YMCA in Cleveland. He did this stupid reverse flip and came down flat on his arm. The lifeguard had to fish him out while everyone just watched and the whole pool got shut down for an hour. They took the board out the next summer and put in one of those rubber mat things for kids to jump on.
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