Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of hiring a gate attendant for your club for the weekends. Is there a case to be made for spending money on a paid gate attendant position at your club?

Pros:

• An actual person manning the gate. This would mean 100% stop-loss for gate crashers.
• Train your members to always sign in and wear their wristbands. Members would still be required to sign in via the kiosk, and wristbands would still be required as well, but there would now be an actual person verifying that members check in and are wearing their wristbands. While this might seem like overkill, let’s remember that we’re only talking about the weekend. So this will train your members to actually sign in and wear their wristbands on the weekends, which will (presumably) translate to the weekdays.
• Increase revenue for guests. Whether it’s through pre-paid guest passes or cash taken at the gate, having an attendant at the front gate will ensure that guests are properly paid for.
• Oversight of snack shack. If your club has a snack shack where members can grab chips or cookies or a soda and pay for it in a cookie jar (as opposed to a manned snack stand with cooked food), a gate attendant can provide oversight. You could also implement snack shack credits, where kids can grab a snack and the gate guard can add it to a running tab for snacks.
• Extra hands to keep the facility tidy. A paid gate attendant can help the lifeguards and members keep the place clean and tidy. We’re not necessarily talking about having the gate attendant clean the toilets, just ensure that the garbage cans aren’t overflowing, there aren’t soda cans lying on the pool deck, and abandoned towels are put in the lost and found at the end of the day.

Cons: You’ll have to pay someone. But we think there’s a case to be made that this isn’t really a con at all. Let’s look at the numbers: You could pay a neighborhood teen minimum wage to sit at the front gate on weekends only. At a rate of $8.25 an hour, you’d be paying roughly $135 each weekend (8 hours on Saturday and Sunday). For a 12 week summer, that’s about $1,600 total. For the entire summer. Your club could probably swing this cost by simply enforcing payment for guests.