Southwest Community Center

My son loves to swim for 3h straight. I don't know why but other pools seem to have way too short swimming sessions. So we made the drive over to SW community center. The staff are always friendly, and there is a good vibe in the pool.

Nice enough place. Update: Double-Checked the online schedule again because of previous non-congruency. I drive 4 to 5 mi to get here because of the pool. Because of the website being such a cluster, I have to make sure I'm 100% right on the schedules and times. I show up yet again and it is different than the online schedule time. I'm not going to stop coming But I am going to continue to go to Matt dishman, a much older less good pool, because at least their schedule always matches up. The reason I give a two star has to do with the bureaucracy around the Portland public recreation system. The website is atrocious at best for being able to navigate. Forget trying to even purchase a membership online. The differential way in which the staff is trained is abysmal as well. You look online about one of the schedules, especially the pool schedules, And there are so many caveats that you call and ask for clarification. In the morning one staff says one thing in the afternoon they say a different thing and then lastly the evening staff give you yet a third answer that makes you wonder if anyone knows what's going on. Because of this confusion, I asked a pool staff member about adaptive swim times. Online they have a bunch of different meanings of what the adapted swim times are and I was told one thing by the swim staff and another by front desk staff. I show up for the swim time and find that there's a caveat that the same adaptive swim time on the weekend for children is not true for what turns out to be a senior adaptive sometime. This would have been fair enough to have understood in any less than six of the communications with different staff members that I had about the situation. Even during the adaptive swim time I showed up and it took 5 minutes of three different staff members to figure WTF the schedule even meant and I was shown a level of deference that I didn't understand how the schedule worked by the same employees who didn't know how the schedule worked. I understand it's a big bureaucracy but to speak directly to the point: there are very few times available to be able to take my kids swimming at any of the Portland public recreation centers. And when you mix that with very poor delineation on the staff not understanding the schedule, you are not being very helpful to the community. Folks want to go swimming and you can blame whatever kind of staffing problem. It comes down to a bureaucratic problem not allowing the general public to be able to actually use the facilities. And I wouldn't have brought this to public forum unless I had not already gone through the internal review and suggestion box speaking with many supervisors across different parts of the organization. 4.5 rating doesn't accurately describe the feeling it is to try to deal with Portland public rec.

Been a member of other community centers around Portland over the years this one is one of the cleanest/best maintained. It's invaluable having a local place to swim, workout, shoot hoops, etc. that is cost adjusted to your income. Thanks. edit/update (2/12/2025): The crowd is very family-oriented and a lot of busy professionals from the surrounding area. It feels like the kind of environment welcome to all. Its a real privilege to have a hidden gem like this in the neighborhood.

This is a cute place that has all the amenities, some classes and reasonable hours of operation. It's not a big box gym or fancy boutique studio but there's friendly staff, quaint weight room, very clean locker room and facilities. Good for all ages!

Very organized, lots of fun things for young children to do. The pool has numerous lifeguards all around the pool. Fun slide and ...only a limited amount of people allowed in the pool 2 hr sessions