New member of the Devilrays (BAD) will become Board members by the end of the month. They needed an improvement at the leadership level.

By Pepper Parr

October 20^th, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

The allocation of pool time has become a political football – the issue is the swimmers.

Things are beginning to come together for the Burlington Aquatic Devilrays (BAD)

Thew will meet later this month and select five people who will become Board members – giving them a complete roster of 12 Board members.

With the new talent, that hasn’t been identified yet – other than someone named Carl is serving as president on an interim basis, the club expects to be in a position to more positively handle the problems they have with delivering a solid program with so little pool time.

The matter as to just how many Burlington resident are now members of GHAC is still not clear.  What we are hearing is that GHAC is far short of the 85% number required.

We are also hearing that the city is thinking through a different way of determining exactly what a member is – do they live in Burlington or do they live in a Region.

You are always in trouble when you change the rules after the game has been played.

Do the right thing.

BAD has 17 hours of pool time a week at the YMCA  – a decision the city made when the procurement people decided BAD didn’t fully qualify for the 50 hours a week they used to have.

The lack of fairness is astonishing.

What is deplorable is the complete inaction on the part of the members of Council -the exception being ward 2 Councillor Lisa Kearns, who has been talking about having the City Auditor review what actually happened.  No one, at least no one who is talking, is able to say just who made the decision to cripple BAD.

The sense is that it should been made at the Parks and Recreation level but got handed over to Procurement.

It appears as well that Commissioner Jackie Johnson was in the loop somewhere.

Coach Sergei Soloukhin has been carrying much of the administration – he hasn’t missed a stroke yet. New Board members are expected to take on most of the work at the administrative level.

With new BAD board members in place by the end of the month – expect some approaches to be made to reverse one of the stupidest decisions made by Staff members.

Why the majority of the Council members have chosen to become mute might come out in the wash at some point.

Hopefully the new BAD Board will have some muscle.

There is more on this story to come.

Related news story:

What it means to be a competitive swimmer