Rye Leisure Centre has been awarded £271,000 over three years from the National Lottery Community Fund. “It’s fantastic news,” says Centre Director Dan Lynn. “It helps underpin our running costs – it costs around half a million pounds a year to run this place – but also gives us the chance to deliver some really impactful community programmes over the next couple of years.”
The financial challenges of the pool and sports centre are well known he says. “It’s been running at a significant loss, between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds each month. One of my biggest challenges is to make the centre sustainable within three years. We saw a tremendous fundraising effort that was supported by local people and businesses which got us up and running, and that will support us in years 1-3, but during that time we must turn it around and make it sustainable or that money will run out. Therefore, we have to be commercially minded.”
The newly renamed Rye Leisure Centre is now under local management. In April, Rye Town Council took over a twenty-year lease on the site, with Rye Recreation and Wellbeing CIO, a new local charity taking care of the day-to-day running. The facility is owned by East Sussex County Council, and was previously leased to Rother District Council and operated by Freedom Leisure.
It’s a big change says Dan, who has been involved in the process of taking ownership back from the local authorities over the past two years. “The beauty is that we’re a small organisation so we can make decisions very quickly. We can react to things and try new things. If they don’t work, we can change them straight away.”
He paid tribute to the centre’s staff, many with long service at the centre. “They have really mucked in during what has been a very unsettling time. There was a very real chance the town and the local community could have lost this place, so the team here have played a big part in keeping it going and have been really loyal.”
Keeping the pool open sometimes means very long hours in his role as Centre Director. “I’ve done some fourteen-hour shifts over the last few weeks, as have other members of the team. My ethos is ‘we’re not shutting the pool’, but the quantity of staff available has made that challenging at times, and tasks like cleanliness and maintenance suffered. The pool used to shut periodically because there just weren’t enough staff. However, we now have three new colleagues on board who will be taking their lifeguard qualifications next week. That means we will then be fully staffed, and I will be able focus on developing the business and the range of programmes & activities on offer.”
More people are using the centre, with membership up he says. “We’re ahead of where we hoped to be membership-wise, and we’ve added more classes (starting next week!) like Boxercise and Zumba, which are really popular. However, we’re vulnerable in other areas. We need more local schools back swimming with us, and we need people hiring the sports halls, studios, and the MUGA outside.
The National Lottery Community Fund helps immensely he says, as does recent levelling up funding and money from Sport England. Building work is taking place at the centre now. “We’re fixing the infrastructure, repairing leaks and the rendering, and improving access to the building.”
With his family Dan moved to Rye in 2019, and has twenty years’ experience in leisure centre management, including running a large site in London’s West End with thousands through the door each day. “I want to bring some of the things I learnt there to Rye, and to develop a range of accessible, affordable programmes and activities that appeal to all sectors of our community. I’m really passionate about this place – my family and I used the centre three times a week before taking over, so I was already invested in it”.”.
So, what’s it like running the centre in his hometown? “Rye is a really special place. We have such a close community, and each day I see fifty or a hundred people that I know. That makes this more than just a job – it’s personal – and I do feel the responsibility that comes with that, but I love it. It really is a privilege to run Rye Leisure Centre.”
Rye News will have more details on the National Lottery funding – and the schemes it will be used for – in next week’s paper.
Image Credits: James Stewart , Rye Leisure Centre .
Thanks for all the hard work you and your team are doing Dan. It’s so important to keep and improve the leisure centre for all of us in Rye and surrounding areas