Jack Martel realizes his high school swim career has come to an end. He wasn’t expecting the swim club he grew up swimming with to be facing the same fate.

The Twin Cities Swim Team, a club run by the YMCA of Auburn-Lewiston for ages 6 through 18, announced last month that starting in April it will pause its programming.

“TCST is what got me into loving swimming, and it’s definitely sad to see it go, because this was the start of my swimming career, and got me into high school swimming and brought me to a lot of my best times,” Martel, a senior at Edward Little High School, said.

Auburn-Lewiston YMCA CEO Steven Wallace cited significant financial strain and a recent coaching vacancy, since head coach Matt Reed is leaving the area to coach at the Waterville YMCA, for the pause in activities, which include practices and meets. Summer programming will be affected, but Wallace said the pause is only temporary.

Coaches, club members and parents worry about the long-term affects of not having a swim club in the Lewiston-Auburn area.

“You’re closing a program that serves (about) 100 kids,” Allison Toomey, a parent of two club members, said. “Now, those 100 (kids) have no other place to go for swimming (in the area), and that is the only program that is feeding your high school swim programs, which affords individuals opportunities in college.”

Scott Morrison, head coach of the Edward Little/Lewiston/Poland/Leavitt high school co-op swim team, said he worries that the lapse in programming will affect future participation in the sport. He wishes area high school coaches were included in conversations regarding how to best serve the area’s swimmers.

“Ultimately, it’s their decision, and I respect that,” Morrison said. “I don’t agree with it. I respect it, but I wish that we could have sat down and talked about it to see if there were other options or other recommendations, because what I fear may happen here is when you stop a program, even with the intent to restart it, you’re going to lose kids.”

Reed, the former Twin Cities club coach, said the lack of swimmers is an issue throughout the state.

“I think swimming as a whole, across the state, numbers are down,” Reed said. “It’s not just a Lewiston and Auburn thing. There are very few teams left in the state that aren’t a co-op situation.”

This winter, the Edward Little/Leavitt/Poland high school swim team added Lewiston to its co-operative, which means all of the Auburn-Lewiston area’s swimmers are on the same team. There are also several individual swimmers from other nearby schools — such as St. Dom’s, Hebron, Oak Hill and Lisbon this season — who train with the co-op and are coached by Morrison. Most of the high school swimmers also swim for the Twin Cities Swim Club.

Klara Cloutier, a junior and Lewiston High School, has swam with the Twin Cities club for three years. She plans to carpool with Martel and other high school swimmers to Waterville to keep swimming under Reed — an option she realizes doesn’t exist for everyone in the program.

“We’re going to have a schedule, we’ll contribute for gas and tolls, and we’re just going to have karaoke on the ride up, and it’ll just be a ball,” Cloutier said.

Toomey’s 10-year-old and 6-year-old daughters both swim for the Twin Cities Swim Team. Her oldest daughter, who previously tried several other sports, has found a love for swimming.

“The excitement to go to practice, being able to be physically active multiple times a week in a low-impact (way),” Toomey said. “Her confidence with being able to do something and do it independently. … This was something that she could do totally independently, and she got to see the fruits of her labor. It was wonderful to see her get in the pool and learn the strokes and be confident in those strokes and get feedback from coaches and be able to improve from there.”

Toomey’s main concern lies in the lack of communication prior to the decision to pause programming.

“They’ve never indicated over the last three years that Matt’s been the head coach that the program is losing money, or we can’t continue to do this, or we need to do more fundraising,” Toomey said. “We only have one fundraiser a year, and that fundraiser does great.”

The cost to rent the pool at the Lewiston YWCA is $130 an hour and $100 an hour at Bates College, which amounts to roughly $40,000 per year for the club. That cost did not exist before pool at the YMCA on Turner Street in Auburn closed.

“Nobody wants to give us $18 million to build a pool that will lose $200,000 a year, because that’s what pools do,” Wallace said. “You start to put all those things together, and I totally get where the parents are aggravated.”

Wallace said employees and board members have been strategizing financial solutions since Dec. 2024, and that “nothing happened in a vacuum.”

“You’ve got parents and swimmers saying, ‘How come you didn’t tell us earlier?’” Wallace said. “Well, because if I would have told you earlier, you would have lost your mind, like you did when we told you right now; and if we would have told you later, you would have lost your mind saying, ‘How come you didn’t tell us earlier?’ The reality is, the swim team has lost a lot of money.”

Wallace is adamant that this is a pause in programming, and not an end to the Twin Cities Swim Team. He said he plans to transition the club back to the part-time coaching model that successfully operated for two decades before Reed was hired as a full-time coach.

Wallace said he’s already began compiling a group of parents for a selection committee that will help select the part-time coaches. He’s also talked to coaches and stakeholders, and plans to chat with the YWCA CEO and area high school coaches.

“That way we can then go out and say, ‘Hey, we need a part-time coach, these are the hours that we’re looking at running the program,’ and going from there,” Wallace said. “That’s in the communication that I sent to the parents, so it hasn’t changed.”