Students to learn to swim at New YMCA

Forty years of planning and fundraising came to fruition Monday afternoon as the Foothills Area YMCA broke ground on a new 31,000 square foot facility on the campus of Oconee Memorial Hospital. The property has been cleared and now Hogan Construction starts on phase one of the facility that will include a six-lane indoor swimming pool. Oconee County Schools Superintendent Dr. Michael Thorsland spoke at the ceremony and thanked everyone for providing a place to teach students how to swim. “Our community is partly special just because of the beauty that God put here, we live in a beautiful place and whether its those rivers that cut through our mountains or the lakes that were created at the foothills of those mountains, that water kind of brings a little danger to our community and students who grow up here need to know how to swim. On behalf of our school board, I just want to say that we are thankful to all those folks trying to get a YMCA established here in Oconee County because it won’t be long now to where every student that passes through the public schools in Oconee County are taught how to swim. We’re also looking forward to an opportunity to have high school swim teams, something that we’ve never been able to have before without traveling a pretty good distance to practice. So, that is going to be great for our students. So, I just want to thank everyone who has been involved in this, this is really going to benefit the students of our community.” The new facility will also include 12,000 square feet of space with state of the art cardio, free weights, weight machines and group exercise rooms and a cycle studio with the latest technology.