School pool issues last call

The swimming pool at Costa Mesa High School has been through triumphs and tribulations, proud times and embarrassing ones in its more than 50 years in existence.

Generations of Costa Mesa swimmers came to the pool Friday afternoon to share memories and take one last swim on the facility’s last day before it is closed for demolition to make way for a new pool that will be twice as big.

The high school’s pool has several idiosyncrasies that have made life difficult for swimmers and water polo players.

For starters, its odd L-shaped design and short length are a far cry from a standard rectangular 50-meter pool. Frequent pump and heating system failures led to practices getting canceled or moved.

It also sports a 4.5-foot shallow end, which, aside from making it a frequent subject of ridicule for visiting teams, prevented the school from hosting CIF games when they made the quarterfinals this year.

Ed Pollard, who played water polo at Mesa in the early 1970s and now has a daughter in the aquatics program, remembers players jumping up and down in the shallow end to save energy instead of treading water (an illegal maneuver, but one that can be passed off if done convincingly).

“If you’re real tired it’s a blessing. The coach didn’t ever find out,” Pollard said.

The current boys water polo coach, Justin Taylor, is not so easy to fool though, having played for the school from 1993 to 1996, at the tail end of the team’s most glorious era.

Costa Mesa High School shocked the region from 1986-95 (known as the “decade of dominance”) when the water polo team won 10 consecutive Pacific Coast League titles and made the CIF finals six out of the 10 years, winning four times in both divisions 2 and 3.

Those victories were especially sweet to Taylor because of the school’s laughable facilities. Although the pool holds a lot of memories for him, the coach is happy to see it go.

“We hope to usher in a new era,” Taylor said.

He wants to see the school start youth aquatics programs to train kids from a younger age so that they can be ready for high school competition, and he thinks the state-of-the-art pool will be a big draw.