Piedmont's new Community Pool was supposed to ease into its first season. City staff called April a "ramp-up" month, a chance for residents to get used to the two new pools before real demand arrived with summer. That plan lasted about six weeks. By May 22, before Memorial Day weekend and before a single day of official summer pass validity, the city had already closed pass sales to everyone, residents and non-residents alike, because more people wanted in than the pool's first-year operating model had accounted for.
That is the real story of the pool's first five months, and it is still the story now that fall practice schedules are taking over the water. Every schedule change since opening day, from afternoon tube time to holiday reservation caps to today's shift toward water polo, has been a patch applied to a facility that Piedmont built for a town it apparently underestimated. If you live here and want to actually get in the water this fall, understanding that pattern matters more than memorizing the posted hours, because the hours keep moving.
A Model Built for a Smaller Town
The old pool at 777 Magnolia Avenue closed when COVID hit in 2020, and the city never reopened it. At 56 years old, keeping it "marginally functional" was projected to cost more than $4 million over the next decade with no guarantee against structural failure, so Piedmont voters approved Measure UU that November, a $19.5 million bond to replace it entirely. The final project ran closer to $35 million, with the gap covered by a private capital campaign that the Piedmont Recreational Facilities Organization led, pulling in more than $2 million from hundreds of donors.
What that money bought is a genuinely bigger facility: a 27-meter, 12-lane competition pool with a diving well, plus a separate activity pool of roughly 3,100 square feet with zero-depth entry and water kept warm year-round. It sits directly across from Piedmont High School and Piedmont Middle School, and it runs entirely on electric heat pumps, making it one of only two all-electric public pools in California (the other, Mountain View's Rengstorff Park Aquatics Center, opened about a year earlier).
The pool opened April 11 with $5 drop-in swims through the end of the month, a deliberate low-stakes preview before the real pass system started May 1. Once it did, the "build-a-pass" model gave Piedmont residents a roughly 40 percent discount over non-resident rates, and non-resident sales opened May 19. Three days later, both resident and non-resident summer pass sales shut down. The city's own language was direct about why: pass sales to date had run "significantly higher than projected in the pool's first-year operating model." Annual passes stayed open with no cap. The city wasn't worried about total attendance for the year. It was worried about who would be in the water on a Saturday afternoon in July.
The Patchwork That Followed
Summer hours started June 8, and with them came the first real fix: afternoon "tube time" in the Competition Pool, letting swimmers who passed a swim test float on inner tubes in the lap pool instead of crowding the activity pool. It was framed as a way to make the bigger pool feel more recreational and pull pressure off the smaller one, which tells you where the pressure actually was building.
Twelve days later, on June 20, the city made a second adjustment, this one explicitly tied to resident complaints. A portion of the Activity Pool, previously blocked off entirely for swim lessons during peak hours, opened for reserved open swim on a schedule built around the lesson calendar: weekday evenings from 4:30 to 7 p.m., Saturday mornings from 9 to 11:30, Sunday mornings from 9 to noon. Space was capped at 50 people at a time, a small number for a pool serving a town of this size, and reservations were required.
By the Fourth of July, the city stopped trying to run a normal day at all. The holiday schedule offered lap swim in the morning, then locked the rest of the day into two reserved recreation sessions capped at 125 registered swimmers each, with no walk-in access. It was the cleanest evidence yet that this pool, sized for a projected first-year demand curve, was operating well above it by midsummer.
Today Changes the Rules Again
As of today, August 10, the Competition Pool has shifted again, this time for the rest of fall. Through October 30, it's dedicated primarily to water polo practice on weekday evenings and Saturday mornings from 9 to 11 a.m., as Piedmont High's water polo and swim teams move into their fall season. For families used to summer's open lap and recreation hours, this is the biggest single change since the pool opened.
On top of practice time, the Competition Pool will close entirely on six specific game days between now and late October:
- Thursday, September 3, closed 2 to 8 p.m.
- Wednesday, September 9, closed 2 to 8 p.m.
- Tuesday, September 22, closed 2 to 8 p.m.
- Thursday, September 24, closed 2 to 8 p.m.
- Tuesday, October 6, closed 2 to 8 p.m.
- Tuesday, October 20, closed 2 to 8 p.m.
The Activity Pool stays open on all of these dates, and spectators are welcome to watch the games through the Magnolia Avenue gate. If your household relies on lap lanes in the Competition Pool during those windows, this fall is the season to build a backup plan into your routine rather than assume the schedule from July still holds.
What's Actually on the Fall Calendar
Two new events joined the Recreation Department's fall lineup this year, both announced in a July 28 press release: Cardboard Boat Races at the Community Pool on September 19, and a Floating Pumpkin Patch on October 24, where swimmers dive in to claim a pumpkin, then decorate it poolside. Worth noting: the city's own capital-projects page still lists the October event under an earlier working name, "Pumpkin Dive," a small sign that even the fall calendar was still being finalized well into summer.
The Recreation Department is also expanding Food Truck Fridays at Piedmont Park, adding three more nights (August 21, September 18, and October 16) after a strong debut earlier this month, with a start time moved up to 5 p.m. by popular request. For the rest of what's happening around town this fall, from the Harvest Festival to Halloween weekend, our roundup of Piedmont's six fall weekends covers the wider calendar. This piece is just about the pool.
One more shift lands October 1, when fall hours take effect and the pool closes at 7 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, an hour earlier than its summer Friday closing time. It's a modest change, but it's also the first schedule adjustment all year that shrinks access rather than expands or reroutes it, a sign the city expects demand to soften as the weather turns.
If You Want Pool Time This Fall
Fall Recreation program registration opened for Piedmont residents on August 4, and non-resident registration opens tomorrow, August 11, at 6 p.m. Resident passholders got early access to aquatics program sign-ups on August 3. Given how quickly summer sessions filled, waiting past your registration window is a real risk, not a formality.
Before heading over on a given day, it's worth checking current capacity at rec.us/piedmont, where a yellow alert banner posts when the pool is full, or calling ahead to (510) 420-3090. Priority for admission goes to passholders once the facility fills, which has been a regular occurrence since the pool opened.
None of this makes the Piedmont Community Pool less of an asset for the town. If anything, a facility that outgrew its own demand model in six weeks says something about how much this community actually uses what it builds together. It just means the smart way to enjoy it right now is to read the schedule the way the city writes it: as a live document, not a fixed one.
Whether you've lived in Piedmont for decades or you're weighing what life here actually looks like week to week, the Debbi DiMaggio team tracks these details because they're part of what makes this town what it is. If you're thinking about your next move in Piedmont or the wider East Bay, schedule your VIP consultation and let's talk about what's next.
