The Hayward Plunge opened in 1936, which makes it one of the oldest indoor public pools in the Bay Area. It sits in Memorial Park on Mission Boulevard, it belongs to the Hayward Area Recreation and Park District, and the district lists it as a historical building.
In the fall of 2025 it closed for a $5 million renovation of the whole facility. We did the pool. Two pools, in fact!
The main pool runs 109 feet by 58 feet 8 inches. The children’s pool beside it is 46 feet by 30 feet 5 inches and steps from a foot of water down to two and a half feet. Both were stripped and resurfaced, and the deck around them was rebuilt from the concrete up.
The district closed it for a year and moved everyone across town
Public pools don’t close quietly. When the Plunge shut down, lap swim, lessons and aqua fitness all moved to the Arroyo Swim Center on November 3, 2025, and the district published the closure window: fall 2025 through fall 2026. That’s the schedule the whole project runs against.
The district’s scope is bigger than ours. Parking lot ADA access, electrical repairs, water pipe replacement, interior painting, revisions to the diving boards and the swim lanes. Ours was narrower. The two shells and the deck, sitting in the middle of all of it. Submittals went in on October 8, 2025.
Fifty-two batches of white quartz, none of them allowed to disagree
The finish is Pebble Tec Commercial White Quartz, and it took 52 custom batches to cover both pools. That number says more about the job than a square-footage figure would.
Mix 52 batches of anything and the odds say a couple will have opinions. They don’t get to. Each batch has to match the last, on a surface a few hundred people a day will stare at under bright indoor light for the next twenty years. A seam between batch 30 and batch 31 is the kind of thing nobody notices on opening day and everybody notices by year three.
The old surface came off first. Shell preparation on a pool this age is the unglamorous half of resurfacing, and it’s the half that decides whether the new finish is still bonded a decade from now.
The footage shows what we started with: a stained shell carrying a history of patch repairs. Our surface preparation page goes into how we handle that.
The deck was the bigger problem
Owners tend to price a pool renovation as a pool renovation. Then somebody lifts a section of deck.
At the Plunge, the existing waterproofing membrane and coating came off the entire deck. Underneath, the concrete had spalled in places, and where it had, the rebar behind it had corroded.
The engineer’s repair spec is exact about what happens next: saw-cut the damaged concrete back in clean rectangles, chip down to sound material at least three-quarters of an inch behind the corroded steel, and if a bar has lost more than 5 percent of its cross-section, splice in new steel.
One area was past that. The section of deck was removed outright and replaced with a new concrete topping slab poured over galvanized metal decking, carried on the original concrete framing.
Then the whole deck got a new waterproofing system. An epoxy vapor barrier goes on the prepared concrete, and a PMMA traffic coating goes over that, turned up 8 inches onto the wall bases and 6 inches up the grab rails.
The deck slopes at 2 percent or less in every direction so water goes where it’s supposed to. That’s what “structural deck membrane repair and full deck waterproofing” means in practice. A failed membrane doesn’t announce itself. Water shows up years later as rust bleeding through the concrete, a handrail anchor that’s lost its grip, a soft spot nobody wants to step on. Resurfacing over a deck like that buys a good-looking pool sitting on the same problem.
A 1936 building sets its own terms
An indoor pool from the thirties isn’t an outdoor renovation with a roof on it. Access is whatever door the original builders left. Ventilation is whatever the building has. It governs how a finish cures. The parts of the building people recognize, the parts that got it designated historical in the first place, are the parts you can’t swap for a modern equivalent.
The pool surface is the opposite problem. Nobody wants a ninety-year-old pool surface.
A public pool has to meet slip resistance, sanitation load and accessibility standards as they stand today, and the district lists the Plunge as ADA accessible. So the surface gets to be new while the room stays old. That’s more or less the entire brief on a civic restoration, and it’s the same balance we struck at Monterey Sports Park, the College of Marin Miwok Aquatic Center and Pacific Union College.
Watch it happen
We filmed the job. The clip runs a minute forty and carries the whole arc: the drained shell, the crew running a scarifier across the deck, the finished white quartz with its lane lines and depth markers, and the main pool refilled and clear.
Watch Restoring History: The Hayward Plunge Commercial Pool Renovation on our YouTube channel. The district’s construction wraps in October 2026, and reopening is the district’s announcement to make, not ours.
The specification, for anyone pricing similar work
| Item | Hayward Plunge |
| Owner | Hayward Area Recreation and Park District |
| Architect / structural engineer | tBP / Architecture, Walnut Creek / ZFA Structural Engineers, San Francisco |
| Design standard | 2022 California Building Code, Title 24 Part 2; Risk Category III; 100 PSF floor live load |
| Main pool | 109 ft 0 in by 58 ft 8 in |
| Children’s pool | 46 ft 0 in by 30 ft 5 in; 1 ft 0 in to 2 ft 6 in deep |
| Pool finish | Pebble Tec Commercial White Quartz, 52 custom batches |
| Deck substrate prep | Mechanically roughened to CSP 3 to 5 (ICRI) |
| Replacement deck section | 3,000 PSI topping slab, 5 in minimum total thickness, over 20-gauge galvanized steel deck; #3 rebar at 16 in on center each way |
| Deck waterproofing | Epoxy vapor barrier under a PMMA traffic coating; 8 in wall upturn, 6 in at grab rails |
| Deck slope | 2 percent maximum in any direction |
Talk to us about restoring your commercial pool
We’ve been finishing pools since 1953. We work with park districts, schools, cities and hospitality properties across the Bay Area, the Central Valley and Las Vegas. Our commercial pool construction and renovation page covers what that involves, and our pool resurfacing page goes deeper on finishes.
Adams Pool Solutions, 3675 Old Santa Rita Road, Pleasanton, California 94588. Call (925) 828-3100 or (800) 675-0665.
