As soon as this summer, residents living near Truman College in Uptown could have a chance to take classes at the school’s swimming pool.

Every few years, waves of interest ripple through parts of Uptown about opening up the swimming pool at Truman.

Truman spokesman Clifton Daniel says several people have asked him about the pool in the last week.

“Interest in the community percolates up every once in a while,” Daniel says.

The six-lane indoor pool takes up the north end of the building that also houses Truman’s gym, theater and auto shop.

Even though Truman doesn’t offer any swimming classes right now, the facility is hardly dormant. Six days a week, dozens of kids and teenagers from three local schools and U.S.A. Swimming train and practice in the pool.

A co-op of swim teams at Walter Payton High School, Jones College Prep High School and Amundsen High School use Truman’s pool, as do several youth club teams from the Irving Park YMCA. In all, that’s usually more than 100 kids, says Jim Cortez, the head coach for U.S.A. Swimming.

“These are all schools that don’t have swimming pools, that wouldn’t have anything if they didn’t use this,” Cortez says.

The arrangement with the city colleges for other schools to use the pool is possible because the YMCA and U.S.A. Swimming pay to insure their own activities. And aggressive fundraising efforts by parents with students in the swimming program have funded a new projection scoreboard, electronic timing system pads, a public address system and new benches.

“It takes everybody to work on this thing because it’s not cheap to do,” Cortez says.

Swimming runs in the Cortez family: his daughter Rachel, 16, has been swimming for a decade.

“It’s nice of Truman to lend us the facility,” she says in between laps in the pool Wednesday afternoon. “They gave us total freedom to put our equipment in here.”

But the college isn’t in a position to open up its pool to the public by itself, Daniel says. Liability insurance would be too expensive and the locker rooms need costly repairs to fix damage from water leaking through the building’s foundation.

“We don’t want to have the community over there unless we can insure them and hire lifeguards,” Daniel says. “It’s all about money.”

Eventually, he says, the college wants to open the pool back up to its own students.

Fortunately, residents probably won’t have to wait for the city colleges’ bureaucracy before they can have a chance to use the pool, too. Cortez is hoping to start offering a broader range of classes at the pool through the YMCA by this summer. Cortez says he wants to launch master’s swimming sessions.

Before the program can grow too fast, though, someone needs to come up with the money to fix the locker rooms.

Cortez and others say they have not come up with an exact price for what is needed.

“It’s a multi-million-dollar issue,” Cortez says. “It’s not something that can be alleviated overnight.”

Despite the challenges, Cortez has high hopes for future swimmers using Truman’s pool.

“I can envision us having Olympic qualifiers out of here in four years,” Cortez says. “That would be my dream.”

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