PENDLETON — Jeff Hamilton has been preparing for a lifeguard shortage for six months.

“I knew in January that I was going to have trouble,” he said. “Not only did I have to get certified guards, I had to recertify myself.”

Hamilton, a recreation supervisor with the city of Pendleton, said lifeguard certifications last two years, meaning many of the guards he certified in 2019 would need to be recertified this year due to last year’s closure.

Hamilton said the facility usually starts the season with about 40 lifeguards, a number that has dropped to 34 this year.

“I’m kind of close to what I want, but if we’re fully ramped up I could probably use a few more,” Hamilton said.

The biggest changes this year have come in the age of his staff, he said. The American Red Cross, the entity through which the city certifies lifeguards, requires participants to be over the age of 15 to receive a certification. While 15-year-olds always have been an option, Hamilton said he typically looks to hire youths over the age of 16 to find more mature staff members.

“When you’re dealing with 15- and 16-year-old kids you are still having to work around the parents’ schedules,” he said.

This year Hamilton said he has eight or nine lifeguards who are 15.

“I basically went to our local swim team and pleaded with the coach to really push how important it was,” he said.

Hamilton’s pleading worked — he said nearly three-quarters of his lifeguards are swim team members, something he said is great but can cause problems when the swim team has meets. On Saturday, June 19, Hamilton said he had to close half the facility and limit capacity to keep an appropriate ratio of lifeguards to swimmers due to a swim meet.

Pendleton Parks and Recreation Department Director Liam Hughes said an increased interest in recreation activities made the staff shortages that much more of a burden.

“Staffing is tougher to find and numbers have been up,” Hughes said. “Summer camp is bigger than last year right now.”

In May, the pool offered swim lessons and filled all five instructors’ worth of classes. Hughes estimates they had enough interest to fill twice as many classes.

Hamilton said learn-to-swim classes are especially important this year as many youths may have spent the last year out of the water and moved from an age where they were swimming with their parents to spending time at the pool more independently.

“My fear was that that age that came from hanging out with your parents to maybe swimming by your own was going to be that group that maybe missed a year,” he said.

Hamilton drew comparisons to when the pool first opened in the late 1990s and lifeguards were plucking kids out of the pool with a much higher frequency than today due to lack of experience with water.

“There is going to be a little bit of that gap so we have to be prepared for it,” he said.

In Hermiston, recreation supervisor Brandon Artz said he is finally feeling like he has enough lifeguards to operate the pool after telling the Hermiston Herald just more than a month ago that he had about half of the 100 staff necessary to open the Hermiston Family Aquatic Center.

“It was a real struggle, but we’ve had some good kids get trained and apply and come through,” he said Monday. “I think we’re pretty much set for the rest of the season.”

Artz said he usually starts recruiting lifeguards in January so they can get trained and hired before summer starts.

“We were kind of running down to the wire,” he said.

Artz said about 86% of the pool’s staff is new this year compared to roughly 40% new staff members in a traditional year.

“We have a lot of people to train and not very much time to do it,” he said.

Key in trying to fill those spots was reaching out to potential employees through social media and offering incentives to returning staff to bring on their friends or others, said Artz. Among those incentives were items such as sweatshirts or other apparel to help encourage returning staff to find new hires.

“It’s kind of a sigh of relief right now,” he said. “We have the staff we need, let’s get this season rolling.”