Washington-Liberty Aquatics Center — Local services in Arlington

Updated August 8, 2025: I promised to update my 1 star review if I saw improvement and I did see positive changes today. I’ve bumped it up from one to three stars because they completed a huge summer maintenance program. They cleaned the showers, steamed the pool deck, cleaned tiles, fixed some water issues, and more. It’s definitely cleaner and it smells much better. But it still hasn’t moved up to four or five stars because today there was no hot water in the shower. I don’t know what it’s like to maintain a facility this complexity. I’m sure it’s challenging. And there’s probably never enough money. But between this pool and Long Bridge, I haven’t had a hot shower after a swim in three months.

The pool is fine. The hours are adequate. But I am taking two stars off for the nasty women’s locker room. Masses of snarled hair, wet TP, and overflowing trash cans were just gross. But what was worse was the smell of urine all over…in the showers, toilets, and changing area. Plus moldy shower curtains. Does this ever get cleaned? I swim in all the Arlington pools and this locker room is the worst. Since the others are better, it suggests a management issue at this one. (UPDATE: it seems to be getting worse. Today the shower was so disgusting, I had to leave without taking a shower. And I’m not like a super clean freak. It is a public locker room. I don’t expect it to be perfect. But there’s been something disgusting in the shower for two weeks so it seems like no one is truly cleaning the showers. I’m taking two more stars off until I see...

The facilities themselves are nice, the lifeguard are pretty friendly, and the price is hard to beat, but the pool manager and admin team take this from probably 4 stars to 1 or worse.

The pool manager has significant inappropriate behavior and the team as a whole has terrible communication.

They like to close for any minor weather event and in don't bother to tell anyone. When asked, they claim driving was dangerous or there was a lightning risk. Well, I had to drive there to find that out so I already did the "dangerous" part, (the roads were clear and dry by the way) and there are exactly zero reported lighting injuries in indoor pools in the entire world, ever.

The pool manager is even worse. He seems to be friends with a sizable group of retirees, who are constantly bickering with eachother, and if you do anything that annoys them at all (like swimming a little to fast or not showering long enough), he makes it your problem. The rest of the time he just sits in his office watching youtube. This guy is just board and likes bossing people arround because he has nothing to do. He's also just all around creepy, I would not let children around him.

In both cases they like to claim they are just following Arlington county rules. I looked them up, they are 10 ish lines long and printed on a board at the pool. 90% of the things they claim are rules they are just making up.

Until they get rid of this pool manager at least I cant...

Very disappointed.

We enrolled our 4-year-old in a swimming class. The instructors and staff seemed okay at first, but I can only rate this place 1 stars because of the negligence we witnessed from both the instructor and the lifeguard. The instructor has a habit of leaving his students unattended to check in or check out other kids — without asking anyone else to watch over them. At one point, our son started walking farther into the pool until it got too deep for him, and he began to struggle. There were four other instructors in the same pool, plus a LIFEGUARD ON DISPLAY, yet no one noticed???

My husband had to call out to get their attention and one instructor rescue our child. Yeah, the lifeguard is really just a display! Very incompetent. This was our first visit, and our overall impression is terrible, not just because of the lack of alertness and responsibility from the instructor and lifeguard, but also because the changing area is few and poorly maintained.

The instructor did apologize to us which we appreciate but we definitely won’t be coming back. Parents, please don’t assume your kids are safe here especially if you’re not...