Evan Moorhead – Princeton Recreation Department Executive Director

Mark Freda: Evan, thanks for joining us today.

Evan Moorhead: Mr. Mayor, thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

Mark Freda: Yep, this should be fun. So, hey, let’s start with this. Evan, could you explain what the executive director of the Princeton Recreation Department actually does?

Evan Moorhead: Absolutely. It is important to first understand what the Recreation Department does, and then I can explain what the executive director does.

The Recreation Department develops, oversees, administers a wide menu of recreation programs for the residents of Princeton. We also manage and maintain numerous parks and recreation facilities, and the recreation director, the executive director is responsible for overseeing everything that goes along with that: the managing of the staff, the planning of the budget, enforcing all of the policy that goes along with the Recreation Department and our programs and our facilities.

We have 13 full-time staff, and our staff in the spring and summer balloons to upwards of 200 individuals. And so it’s a big operation, and the executive director is charged with managing all of that and overseeing that operation, and ultimately reporting on that to the Recreation Commission and to the mayor and council.

Mark Freda: So small job. Keeps you a little busy.

Evan Moorhead: Especially in the summertime. This is our busy season. This is Christmastime for us.

Mark Freda: So how about a short history of the Recreation Department. About when was it founded? Do we know who the first director was? How many directors have there been before you? That kind of stuff.

Evan Moorhead: Sure. Everybody loves a little history, and I’m a student of history, too. And the department itself was founded in 1964. It was a joint department of the Princeton Borough and Princeton Township. There was a joint recreation commission that decided at that point in 1964 that they needed to hire their first executive director.

Up until that point, there had been no full-time employees of the department.

Mark Freda: Hmm.

Evan Moorhead: They had been managing with a lot of seasonal and part-time staff and doing a lot of summer programming. But the decision was made that it was time to commit to having a full-time department, and that required an executive director.

The first director of the Recreation Department was Don Barr. We refer to him as the godfather of Princeton Recreation. Don, I believe, just turned 92. He splits the year between LBI and Florida, so Don is very much still with us and stops by maybe once a year or so to catch up. And so he was hired in 1964.

He was the director up until 1990 when he retired, so he has had a nice long retirement. Jack Roberts took over. Jack had been a longtime employee with Don, and Jack was then the director for the next 20 years, retiring in 2010. Ben Stentz, a good friend of mine, high school classmate of mine, was the third recreation director.

He left the municipality in 2021, and so I am the fourth director in over 60 years of Princeton Recreation Department history. So it’s an honor and a privilege, and certainly it is big shoes to fill with some of those names I mentioned, but also we have got a great track record here and certainly a history of some folks that have really made some improvements to the town.

Also very well known in the state. All those gentlemen that I know were very instrumental in terms of furthering municipal recreation throughout the state of New Jersey, and so just a great history of recreation here in Princeton.

Mark Freda: Between my time as mayor now and the time I was on the Borough Council in the ’80s and ’90s, having done both those stints in local government, I have had the privilege of working with all four of you as directors of the Recreation Department, and we have been blessed with the four of you. It has been really amazing the leadership that we have been able to experience. Thank you. So thank you. All right. So hey, Evan, let’s talk a little bit about the pool complex, maybe when it first opened and then how it’s changed, right? Because it’s not the same pool complex that was originally there.

Evan Moorhead: No, absolutely. It’s definitely changed. So the pool complex opened, CP Pool 1.0, as we sometimes refer to it, opened in 1967. In fact, that was one of Don Barr’s mandates when he was hired as the recreation director, was to explore the idea of a pool complex here in Princeton, and so that was a couple year process from when he was hired to when that pool actually opened.

And I know they looked at a couple different areas in and around Community Park before settling on the area where it currently is situated. But the original pool opened in 1967. And that ran all the way through until Labor Day of 2011. The day after Labor Day in 2011, we began construction on the new pool complex, CP Pool 2.0.

And so that entire off-season from 2011 to 2012 was spent building the new pool complex. I don’t think there were many people who actually thought we were going to get open by Memorial Day weekend 2012, but we had one of the mildest winters in recent memory, which was a huge assist, and our construction crews and everyone came together, and we had that pool complex ready to go for that Memorial Day weekend 2012.

And so what you see now is the CP Pool, the second generation of Community Park Pool, and people still refer to it as the new pool, which we take as a compliment even though we’re in summer number 16, which means that we’re doing something right in terms of keeping it looking brand new and keep it functioning at its optimum level.

We certainly did change some things from the original pool to where we are now. We added a slide, which the old pool had a dive well, but it didn’t have a slide, so that has been a huge hit, was adding the slide. We added a family bay to the pool complex, which is the transition area into the main pool. It’s an area where when families and their young children outgrow the kiddie pool, the wading pool, before their child is maybe ready to go full force into the main pool, but it’s an area that has a zero depth entry, and the water gets gradually deeper.

And so those young kids that maybe aren’t quite ready to be on their own in the main pool, but it’s an area where mom and dad can be with them in the family bay, or they can be on their own. So that was an addition. We added some spray features that we didn’t have, and obviously the locker rooms and the facility itself was all brand new and changed.

But we kept a lot of the original feel of the old pool. People often referred to it as a pool within a park, which I think it really is because there’s so much green area out there in terms of the trees and the shade and the grass. And so there’s not as much hardscaped area as you might find in some other community pools that you go to, and that was intentional.

And even the design with the locker rooms, there was some intention in keeping some of the open air to the ceilings. We also added that community meeting room area where people can gather for birthday parties. We use it a lot for our day camp in the summertime. Kids eat lunch in there. So some real intentional additions to the complex that weren’t there.

But that original pool complex served this community very well. From 1967 to 2011, the town got its money’s worth, and we’re hoping to do so, keep this pool 2.0 going for many more decades.

Mark Freda: So now that it’s, now that summer’s started, let’s talk about some of the summer youth programs. I think you’ve been doing them, or the recreation department’s been doing them for quite a while, but maybe you could highlight some of the, what’s going to happen actually this summer.

Evan Moorhead: Sure. Some of our traditional programs, many of which have proven to be very popular over years and decades. That includes, and I’ll name a few here, some of our bigger ones. I’ll start with the youth day camp. That’s a program that runs for six weeks. We actually start in late June and run for six consecutive weeks.

We will have anywhere from 150 to 200 kids per week, rising grades one through six, so that requires a lot of staffing. We will have counselors and supervisors and directors for the entire program. Requires a lot of planning when you have that many kids in your care every day, and it’s a program that we really look forward to because those kids bring the energy every day.

You have got 200 kids, elementary school-aged kids every day. They bring the energy, so you have to match it or else they’re just going to trample you, right? They’re going to run you over. And we don’t want that, so we’re very fortunate that we have great facilities where we can bring those kids to, like the pool.

Evan Moorhead: So those kids get to come every day to the pool for lunch. At noon every day, they’re coming for lunch. After they’re done eating lunch, which a lot of times is in like 30 seconds or a minute, they’re eating their lunch as fast as they can because they want to get in the water and go swimming. And so they get to swim after that for an hour or an hour and a half. We offer swim lessons to those kids when they’re in the program as well, so they get a lot of aquatic time when they’re in our care. A lot of time outdoors doing more traditional stuff like playing soccer or playing kickball, playing different games that they might play out in the park.

We make use of the community park school playground a lot. It has some nice shade to it. Kids like to play on the jungle gym. We do walks with a nature walk, some things like that. We just keep them busy playing board games on days maybe if the weather’s not as nice. We will do things like board games.

We will make use of the community park elementary school for indoor space. We don’t have an indoor facility of our own. That’s one of our challenges with all of our programming, and so we partner with the public schools, and they provide those facilities. So the day camp obviously is the biggest single summer program that we run in that regard.

Teen Travel Camp, another longstanding program of ours that’s been going on since the ’90s, where we have a five-week program. Every day we take a busload of teens rising grades seven through 10 on a trip somewhere, usually somewhere in the state of New Jersey. Sometimes we venture out into PA, maybe go to somewhere like Dorney Park, things like that.

But we go to the beach a lot. We go bowling, we go to the movies. We do Great Adventure, different amusement parks, different other activities like that, and every day is a different trip. And so that takes a tremendous amount of planning. You have to have really strong staff to accompany the students on those trips, and the capacity is a school bus full.

And we max those weeks out every week, all summer long for five weeks. So that’s another really popular program that we run. We have a very popular and very successful summer swim and dive team called the Community Park Bluefish that runs out of Community Park Pool. We have roughly 300 kids in that program across the swim and dive teams.

We haven’t lost a swim meet in over 10 years. So when I say successful, I mean we’re very successful. We compete against other swim clubs in the Princeton Area Swim and Dive Association. We host meets here at Community Park in the evenings, and then the championship meet, which is in late July, is a morning and an afternoon meet here at Community Park.

So that’s something where not only are kids improving their swim skills, but they’re getting to compete against other municipal, whether it’s municipal or private swim clubs in the area, and so that’s really exciting. It brings a level of competition, but also a level of fun and a way for our community to kind of bond together in a team fashion, which is really exciting for the kids, and our coaches do a great job of turning that into just a really fun experience across the entire eight weeks of the program.

Swim lessons is another program that I’m really proud of, that we do a great job of just outreach and including a lot of people in the community. And so we, over the course of a summer, we might have over 500 kids come through our swim lesson program. That includes swim lessons that we’re offering to the public, swim lessons through our day camp program, and then some partnerships that we’ve developed with some other organizations to offer their students and their kids swim lessons.

And there’s no greater life skill than learning how to swim, and learning how to swim at an early age is so important for kids to gain that comfort in the water, to feel confident that they can swim and that they can go into water that’s going to maybe be over their head. And so we take that really seriously, and our staff, our lifeguards, our aquatics director staff, they do a really great job with organizing those lessons, and we try to reach as many people as we possibly can, because we know ultimately that can be a lifesaving skill for somebody.

And so that’s something that’s really important to us, and we do a great job with trying to get that information and get those skills out to the community.

Mark Freda: And I think you guys also run a number of adaptive programs. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about those.

Evan Moorhead: Sure, we do. And that’s an area where really over the last decade we’ve really expanded our outreach. I mean, we’ve had a longstanding relationship, a partnership with the Princeton Special Support Program, which is an independent organization that’s in Princeton and that has for years worked with the adaptive community.

And so we’ve partnered with them to run monthly dances, adaptive dances, and they sometimes are held at local school gyms. We hold some of them at the community park in our community room. And so that’s an area that we’ve done for many decades, and so we’ve worked with the Princeton Special Sports to host those monthly dances.

And so we’ve developed a network there with those folks already that we’ve then used, and we’ve sort of expanded our menu of options into areas like adaptive yoga, adaptive Zumba, adaptive music therapy, sports clinics where we’ve partnered with some third party groups to run some sports clinics and things like baseball.

We’ve done track. We’ve partnered with some of the coaches at the university to do that. We’ve done adaptive pickleball clinics. And so we’re really fortunate that over the last decade we’ve had some really strong program staff who had an aptitude and an interest and a creativity and have explored ways to expand what we do, have done more outreach into the adaptive community, have listened to what they’ve wanted to do.

We’ve developed an adaptive cooking program this year. That was another new program that we’ve added. So we’re not afraid to try new stuff. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But our intention has been to provide a variety of opportunities for that community, and there’s a lot of word of mouth once the adaptive community, they will help spread the word for you once there’s programming that is of interest to them and that you’ve proven that you’re going to continue those programs.

And so we’ve developed that relationship now where we are looking to provide programs and they provide feedback and it’s reciprocal.

Mark Freda: You mentioned pickleball. So pickleball seems to be a pretty popular sport. The recreation world would know that best, so what are we doing as far as pickleball goes?

Evan Moorhead: So pickleball, if you had asked me this question before COVID, it was on our radar only very loosely. That was not something that we were all that familiar with and not something that we were hearing a lot about. But shortly after COVID, we started to get a lot of requests from the community for pickleball, and so it was very quickly on the radar of the staff and the recreation commission.

And so the commission challenged the staff to look at it and figure out how we could accommodate that need. And so what you ended up doing was taking… At the time, we had 15 tennis courts, and so we made the decision that three of those courts would be transitioned into pickleball courts. So we took three tennis courts and converted them into six pickleball courts by removing the tennis lines, repainting them, and painting pickleball lines.

And so that was a way where we were able to very quickly address that need for the community so that then there were now courts that would be available on a first-come, first-serve basis. There wasn’t a membership and we weren’t programming them at the time. We have since added pickleball clinics that the Recreation Department is offering as a program, and so those have been fairly popular and we’re continuing to offer those at different seasons of the year.

And the courts outside of that continue to be open first-come, first-serve for the community. They seem to be very popular at different times of the year and different times of the day and different days of the week. The pickleball community, I think, has evolved and they learn how to communicate with each other and figure out when the best times are, and I think they organize meets among themselves.

But the courts have been a big hit. It’s a sport that seems to be here to stay, and so we’re happy that we had the ability to be able to provide that opportunity on relatively short notice. We didn’t have to go and build new courts anywhere, which would have been a real challenge because we are landlocked in a lot of ways and we don’t have new plots of land to develop into park properties so.

Mark Freda: How flexible the Recreation Department here is to look at like, okay, here’s a need or here’s something that we need to expand or whatever. So that’s, you guys should be commended for that.

Evan Moorhead: Thank you.

Mark Freda: Platform tennis, is that still around? Is that still a thing?

Evan Moorhead: Platform tennis is also still a thing. So we have three racket sports. We have our tennis courts, we have our pickleball courts that we just spoke about, and then we have platform tennis, which is the longstanding program and facility here in Princeton. We have four platform tennis courts.

We offer platform tennis leagues. It’s a winter sport, so the leagues take place starting in like late November, early December through the winter. There are lights out there, so they play a lot of times at night. And so they are a very hardy but committed group of platform tennis players that we have here in Princeton.

And so you don’t need to participate in the leagues. You can also buy a pass that allows you to just use the courts when they’re not being used for the leagues. And then outside of those winter months, those courts are available for just first-come, first-serve use, so.

Mark Freda: So I imagine a number of our programs must cost money. Let’s say somebody needs financial assistance. Do we offer anything? Can we help in any way in that regard?

Evan Moorhead: Sure. We absolutely do. And the number of requests that we’re receiving is something that’s growing. We’ve noticed a real uptick in the number of requests for financial assistance and the demonstrated need for financial assistance. So it’s something that we’re very aware of and it has always been a commitment of the Recreation Department and the Recreation Commission to make sure that all Princeton residents can take part in our programs regardless of their ability to pay the full fee or not.

Mark Freda: So if I want to donate money, if anybody listening wanted to donate money to the Recreation Department and said, “Hey, we want to help provide financial assistance for these programs,” is there a way to do that?

Evan Moorhead: People can donate money directly to the Recreation Department and tell us how they want it to be used. We also have a scholarship fund and trust with the Princeton Area Community Foundation, where if individuals, families, whoever want to give money, that can then be on a tax-deductible basis because that is a 501[c][3].

So they can give money to an endowed fund that we have at the Princeton Area Community Foundation, and then we have the ability to draw off of that to help pay and offset costs for financial assistance.

Mark Freda: Okay. So speaking of expenses and things like that, we have the pool operation, we have camps, you got all these programs. So how do you cover the cost of all that?

Evan Moorhead: All of our programs, all of our pool operation, that’s all funded not by tax dollars, but by the fees that we collect from registrations and from memberships and from the donations and the partnerships that we have with other organizations. So no tax dollars go into the operation, the management, the upkeep of the pool, or any of our summer programs.

And so what does that mean exactly? That means that when we go to pay our lifeguards and our customer service staff and our day camp counselors, that money is all coming from the registrations that we’ve taken in. So we have to be able to pay those bills. When we have to go pay for the chlorine for the pool, that money has to be there from the memberships that we’ve sold and the daily admissions.

So it’s a real exercise in budgeting and fiscal management to run those programs and to run the pool complex because there’s a lot that goes into it, and with the guidance of the Recreation Commission, that’s why it’s so important that we manage our financial responsibilities very carefully.

Mark Freda: All right, so here’s, here’s a question. I don’t know that everybody knows exactly where your offices are located. They might know where the pool is, but I don’t know that they actually realize where your offices are. So where are the Recreation Department offices?

Evan Moorhead: Well, I always use the pool as the reference point. So if you don’t know, our offices are right next to the pool. We’re actually at 380 Witherspoon. So the big municipal complex, the main building is 400. We’re the small building set back from Witherspoon Street right next to the pool, 380.

We’re open Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:00, just like every other municipal office is. We also keep the office open quite a bit in the summertime on weekends because we realize how much foot traffic we get for pool-related things like memberships and daily admissions cards. And so we have that office open at least the first five or six weekends of the summer from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM as well, so.

Mark Freda: So let’s talk a little bit about you because I think you have a pretty interesting journey within the Recreation Department. So maybe you could share that with us.

Evan Moorhead: Sure. I’m happy to do so. So my journey began, this wasn’t a journey that I even knew was probably beginning at the time it began, but my first ever paid job, collecting a paycheck, which was probably at that time, I don’t know, all of like $5 an hour or $5.25 an hour, was working at the tennis courts as an attendant at this community park tennis courts back in the spring and summer of 1990.

I was a high school student. My mom told me I needed to go out there and get a job that particular summer, and so I applied to the Recreation Department. In fact, I think Don may have still been the director at the time, although he wasn’t the person that hired me, so I like to think my lineage at Princeton Recreation goes all the way back to when Don was still the director.

Evan Moorhead: And so I was hired for that job. I worked through the spring and the summer, helping to maintain the tennis courts and check IDs and passes there at the courts during that time. And little did I know where 30 some odd years later I would be sitting in the executive director chair.

And so a lot happened obviously in those interim years to get me to where I am today. During this time, I was furthering my education, getting a master’s degree at Temple University in sports and rec administration. I didn’t have a background in terms of that in my undergrad work, but at some point early in my adulthood, I realized that the path I was on with my job at the time, my full-time job, wasn’t something I could see myself in for my entire career.

So I began to search for opportunities that were more in line with what I wanted to do, which was to work in my community, work within sports and recreation, and I found out about a master’s program at Temple University. And so I, while working full-time outside of the recreation field, was going back at night and getting my master’s degree in sport and rec administration, and still doing the part-time jobs here at the rec department and some others at the Princeton University Athletic Department that I had sort of found myself involved with and stumbled upon.

And at a certain point, I graduated with my master’s degree from sports and recreation administration. I got hired full-time in the athletic department at Princeton University, worked there for approximately eight years managing their recreation facility, Dillon Gym, as one of their assistant directors of campus recreation.

And then when there was some change here about the time that Jack retired and Ben took over as the director, there was an opening, and I applied for it and worked 10 years alongside Ben as the assistant director. He was the director. And when he decided that he was ready for a change in his career and left the municipality, I was more than ready and eager to take over as the executive director, and so here I am.

Mark Freda: There you go. It’s interesting how you end up where you end up.

Evan Moorhead: Absolutely. I know that was a little bit of a winding path to get here, but hopefully it got me to where I am today and certainly provided me with a lot of skills that have helped me in my career and knowledge of the community, so.

Mark Freda: Right. So I assume you grew up in Princeton.

Evan Moorhead: I did. Moved here at the age of 10 from Raleigh, North Carolina. My dad was a professor at NC State, and then got a job at the Princeton Theological Seminary. So summer of 1984, we moved to Princeton, and went right to Princeton Middle School. At the time it was John Witherspoon, now we call it Princeton Middle School.

At that time, fifth graders actually were at the middle school, so things were a little bit different. There were only two elementary schools open in Princeton at the time, so just a little bit of a different era here in Princeton. But went, graduated from Princeton High School, and I’ve been in the area, if not living in Princeton, which I do now, I’m a resident of Princeton, but very close by. Even in my young adulthood, I was always right in the area. So long ties to Princeton. My parents still live here in the house that I grew up in. My brother and sister are both relatively local, and my wife’s family is all local, so we’re very much Princetonians at this time, although my wife is a third generation Princetonian, so she often gives me grief.

She says I’m not a true Princetonian since I wasn’t actually born here. Been here for 40 some odd years now, but I’m not, in her mind, I’m not a true Princetonian.

Mark Freda: You’re getting close.

Evan Moorhead: I am getting close. I might keep asking you, at what point do I reach just the status of being a true Princetonian? I’m not there yet, so maybe she’ll let know when I get there.

Mark Freda: Evan, I want to thank you for being with us today. This has been great.

Evan Moorhead: Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity, and thank you.