Jake Schellenberger was sitting in his office in Lynchburg, Va., with a Liberty University swimming recruit and her mother. He had just given the pair a tour of the natatorium he had painstakingly designed himself years earlier — from its brushed concrete pool deck to the natural light filling its locker room.
“Do we have any questions?” the Lady Flames’ first and only head coach asked. “What are your thoughts?”
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Jake Schellenberger was sitting in his office in Lynchburg, Va., with a Liberty University swimming recruit and her mother. He had just given the pair a tour of the natatorium he had painstakingly designed himself years earlier — from its brushed concrete pool deck to the natural light filling its locker room.
“Do we have any questions?” the Lady Flames’ first and only head coach asked. “What are your thoughts?”
The mom looked at Schellenberger and said, “You’ve had a lot of success. You have this great program. What if somebody bigger comes and tries to steal you away?”
A straight-faced Schellenberger answered her question with one of his own.
“Who?”
He let his query hang in the room for several seconds for dramatic effect and to emphasize his point. In his mind, there is no better place to compete in all of collegiate swimming than at Liberty University, winner of seven conference championships, including the last six. Same goes for Liberty Natatorium, with its bowl-style spectator seating for 1,400, its nine-lane 50-meter pool with a movable bulkhead, and its separate 17-foot diving well with 1- and 3-meter springboards and a three-column tower.
And while questions may fill the Liberty air during recruiting visits, the smell of chloramines does not. That’s because the seven-year-old natatorium employs the most sophisticated water-treatment and air-handling technologies available. Its 50-meter pool was among the first in the country to feature Paddock Pool Equipment Company’s patented gutter-based Evacuator® system, which pulls chloramines from the point of their highest concentration — just above the water surface — and exhausts them to the building exterior. The pool features a blower at the far end to move the unhealthy air toward the Evacuator located beneath the starting blocks, which Paddock also supplied. There’s a separate Evacuator in the diving well, and twin Paddock Regenerator® filtration systems serve both bodies of water.
“As long as we’ve been building indoor pools, we’ve been putting the air-handling system in the ceiling. That’s all well and good, but we don’t swim in the ceiling. We swim down here,” Schellenberger says. “Your head is two inches from that surface of the water, your heart rate’s 160 and you’re taking in a lot of oxygen. You’re breathing really heavily, and a lot of that air has a high volatile-organic-compound component to it.
“We already have the technology to put water in the gutter. Water flows over the gutter, it goes into a tube, and then it runs back to the pump room, where it’s filtered and recycled back out to the pool. I give the Paddock engineers a lot of credit. They said, ‘Why don’t we shrink down the air tubes and put them in the gutter of the pool?’ Brilliant.”
Clearly, Schellenberger takes great pride in his facility. In fact, he still has the initial sketch he made of his “dream pool” upon arriving at Liberty from Penn State, complete with “cool little features” such as a ready room, from which swimmers emerge as they are introduced by the public-address announcer before championship races. Still, it would be years until the $22 million Liberty Natatorium replaced the six-lane, 25-yard campus recreational pool in which Schellenberger’s fledging program had tasted its earliest successes. “I said, ‘Hey, if we’re going to build a pool, we get one shot. Let’s do it right,” he recalls. “I really wanted to do my plan and build the pool that I wanted to build, not the pool that the architects wanted to build.”
Rock Hill, S.C.-based Paddock learned of Liberty’s plans to upgrade its facilities and reached out to Schellenberger, earning his trust to outfit the pools with the industry’s best products. “I believe, without a doubt, that we have the best air and water quality in the country,” he says. “And that’s thanks to Paddock.”
It’s a selling point that facilitates the recruitment of top prospects. “Especially if they have asthma or any type of breathing issues, or if they’re compromised in some way,” Schellenberger says. “Believe it or not, there are swimmers who are allergic to chlorine, and they keep swimming. If you’re allergic to chlorine and you want to keep swimming, this is the place to do it.”
Recruits — and their inquisitive parents — can rest assured of one thing: Schellenberger’s loyalty to Liberty, which began competing at the NCAA Division I level in 2010. “I don’t think there’s a better pool in the country, so why would I leave for a bigger and better facility? I’m not going anywhere. I love this place. Anywhere I could go, from a facility standpoint, would be a step down — again, thanks to Paddock.”
