Toronto YMCA Mismanagement

Court Usage Analysis

In my meeting March 20 with Athletic Director Greg Miller (reported to the squash email list shortly afterwards), he volunteered details of a usage survey that was conducted prior to the installation of Cycle Fit in 1997. Usage of the various facilities, he told me, was recorded every half hour throughout the day. The numbers showed that the average squash court was used more than twice as much as the average racquetball court.

Greg did not remember the exact Squash:Racquetball court usage ratio, but it was, on a court-to-court basis, something like 2.2:1. In any case, it was more than 2:1.

Let’s suppose, for the purpose of this analysis, that the Squash:Racquetball court usage ratio was exactly 2:1. As shown below, this means Cycle Fit should have been installed on a racquetball court rather than a squash court.

Note that the 2:1 ratio is on a court-to-court basis. That is, it compares usage of a typical squash court with the usage of a typical racquetball court. But there were 5 squash courts at the time of the usage survey (which took place before the installation of Cycle Fit), and 2 racquetball courts. Since there were more squash courts than racquetball courts, the total usage ratio was higher than 2:1.

To derive the total usage ratio from the survey’s 2:1 ratio, we multiply by the number of courts to get:

The Y could have obtained exactly this ratio by installing Cycle Fit onto a racquetball court. If they had done that there would have been 5 squash courts and 1 racquetball court -- a 5:1 ratio!

Despite the results of the Y’s usage survey, Greg insisted to Ed Dewar at the time that the numbers supported locating Cycle Fit on a squash court, and Y management went ahead with their plan, ignoring Ed’s 50-signature petition from members in the process.

I wrote out and explained this analysis to Lesley in our April 26 meeting. She had no comment.

As for Golf:

The golf court has been a situation that speaks for itself fairly eloquently for a long time now. What more can an analyst do but point to how it’s almost always empty? The golf court was the subject of an earlier petition, in May, 1999, which was rebuffed by management on the basis of the claim that the golf court was used as much as the squash courts.

Lesley indicated in our April 26 meeting that the low usage of the golf court has now become apparent to her as well. She mentioned they like to give a new program sufficient time for members to develop interest, but that golf, having been there for over a year, did not seem to be generating sufficient interest.

Since that meeting, she has publicized her decision to restore the golf court to the squash program.