If you had met six-year-old Kevin Post, you’d never expect his adult self to serve as an aquatics leader.
“I was … terrified of swimming and swim lessons,” says the principal and director of aquatic operations with St. Louis-based aquatics powerhouse Counsilman-Hunsaker. “I wouldn’t put my face in the water.”
When his family got a pool, his mother decided he needed to be comfortable and proficient in water. So she put him on a swim team. Talk about your transformations.“I loved everything about it,” he says. “My life revolved around a pool.”
All he wanted was to become a lifeguard and swim instructor. At 15, he earned his Red Cross lifeguard certification and began teaching swim lessons for the City of Plano (Texas). He eventually did become a lifeguard and pool manager. This work helped put him through university, where he majored in computer science. As graduation neared, and it was time to start planning the IT career, something gnawed at him. “The closer I got to having to make a decision about a new industry, the more I realized I didn’t want to stop working around pools,” he says.
Fortuitously, the aquatics director position opened up at the University of North Texas, and an aquatics career was launched. There, he formed a relationship with Counsilman-Hunsaker, which had designed the pool. Eventually, the firm hired him as a project manager, conducting feasibility studies for communities that wanted a new aquatics center. He not only mastered these studies, but grew his job into a new department.
Now one of the Counsilman-Hunsaker’s owners, Post has played a key role in establishing the company’s collaboration with the American Red Cross to deliver aquatic management services, such as the Red Cross Examiner Service.
Post focuses his work around one mission: “My goal in my career is pretty simple: I want to get more pools open and keep pools open,” he says.
He’s become a visible industry force forwarding this mission. He serves on NSPF’s education committee, which certifies and trains new Certified Pool Operator instructors and updates the curriculum. He participates heavily in USA Swimming’s Facility Development Department, for which he co-presents at Build a Pool conferences, teaching about the process of building and caring for pools and aquatics centers. And he serves on a Model Aquatic Health Code committee that examines the language for informational gaps, outdated information, or opportunities to draw on new research.
And you’ll find him working on various projects such a joint effort to learn more about how to improve air quality in indoor pools.
They all share the same goal: To help owners get the right pools, and operators to sustain them.
“I look at every pool as its own business,” he says. “What do we need to do to make it sustainable and successful?”
