Santa Rosa’s Oak Park Swim and Racquet Club to close

The last lap nears for the landmark Oak Park Swim and Racquet Club, a training ground for champion-tier synchronized swimming and the hallowed spot where generations of Sonoma County kids took their first plunge.

Heirs of Marion Kane Elston, the synchronized-swim pioneer who purchased the east Santa Rosa club in 1973 and died in August at age 81, say they must close the doors on Dec. 31.

“We have hopes of reopening, but we just don’t know,” said one of Elston’s four children, Kari Phillips of Santa Rosa.

Phillips said Tuesday that her late mother, known internationally for the passion, rigor and elegant choreography she brought to her coaching of synchronized swimmers, kept the Oak Park club afloat with infusions of her own money.

Phillips and her two sisters and a brother told club members in a brief, mailed announcement, “The financial magic that the late owner, Marion Elston, performed is unsustainable.”

Elston maintained the club with her savings largely because teaching synchronized swimming classes was her life.

Phillips said it is possible that Oak Park, located near Rincon Valley Middle School on Badger Road, may reopen once her mother’s estate is settled. She said one of the siblings is considering buying out the others’ interest in the family business and reviving it.

Should Oak Park close permanently, it would join the former Mayette Swim Center as a private swim and birthday-party haven unable to survive contemporary economic pressures. The Mayette club on Santa Rosa’s Yulupa Avenue closed in the 1990s, and the land was redeveloped into a cooperative-housing complex.

If this is the end of the Oak Park Swim and Racquet Club, it’s too early to say what might become of the large tract of property that’s now home to a large outdoor pool, a small indoor pool, tennis courts and green spaces.

Heir Kari Phillips and her siblings were feeling their way through the probate process when, just two weeks ago, their father died.

“Our life is upside-down right now,” Phillips said. Her dad, Donald Kane, was living in Santa Rosa when he died.

Don and Marion Kane married in San Francisco, where, at age 19, Marion broke a record for swimming across the Golden Gate. In 1956, she founded the Merionettes Synchronized Swim Team and made it the first such team in the nation to amass 14 consecutive national titles.

The Kanes and their four children relocated to Santa Rosa in 1973. Marion Kane purchased the Oak Park club and founded there the Marion L. Kane International Synchro School.

Throughout the next 42 years she trained many girls as champions, taught untold numbers of tots to swim and encouraged generations of women to stay involved by continuing to engage in synchronized swimming, the surprisingly demanding, music-accompanied sport that combines ballet, gymnastics and swimming.

Word of the club’s impending closure was wrenching to Julia Ingalls, who began training and competing in synchronized swimming at age 6 and trained with Elston for 11 years.

“It was definitely a second home,” said Ingalls, who’s now 19 and attending college in Southern California. “We were there every day. It was a special place. It wasn’t anyplace fancy, but it was comfortable.

“It’s so sad,” said Ingalls, a 2014 graduate of Maria Carrillo High. “It’s an end of an era, definitely. It breaks my heart.”

Eloise Tweeten, now 58, had looked into the Oak Park club in 2001, thinking that her daughters might like to join Marion Elston’s synchronized swimming program. She wound up joining herself and discovering that she loved the camaraderie, creativity and healthful benefits of the sport.

“I was never one for swimming laps, it was boring,” said Tweeten, who helps seniors choose assisted-living homes. She discovered that synchro swimming, by contrast, “was an opportunity to play in the water.”

Now a member of a masters team that Elston assembled and coached until her death last summer, Tweeten said that if Oak Park closes for good, the adults and children on the synchro teams will have to rely entirely on other pools. That will be a challenge, she said, because the teams must have a pool to themselves and be able to play the accompanying recorded music.

After Elston died, her children and the adults and youths who had trained with her have worked to keep the synchronized-swim program going.

Parents of team members are in the process of creating a nonprofit organization to gather money and use it to pay coaches. The adults in the masters program have turned to volunteer coaches. So Elston’s legacy has survived.

Still, Tweeten aches at the thought that the pools may close forever, that Oak Park’s Friday morning water-exercise class may be doomed and that the club’s beloved maintenance man may be out of a job.

“It’s a sad time for all,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.