t’s the ultimate win/win situation.

Some dealers believe they could gain more attention — and respect — from the public if their product received more attention, and respect, in the various National Spa & Pool Institute design award contests.

“If you go to any type of awards banquet, you only see a few aboveground-pool winners, with tons of inground pool winners,” says Rita Rowlen, co-owner of Ultra Modern Pool & Patio in Wichita, Kan. “If you don’t have a $1 million home with a coastal setting, it’s even hard to win an inground award.

“If you don’t have somebody who spent $15,000 on the decking areas, it’s tough to win an aboveground award,” she adds. “But I think a lot of consumers want to see that there are some simple things you can do in the backyard to give it a really good look.”

Pat Walsh, president of The Above Ground Pool & Spa Co. in San Antonio, gets frustrated by how few categories in design award contests are devoted to abovegrounds.

“If there are 45 categories of swimming pools that you can enter — random shapes, geometric, fiberglass, all these different categories — there’s one for aboveground swimming pools,” Walsh says.

This leads these retailers to believe that their own industry views them more as appliance salespeople rather than consultants who can add joy and beauty to their customers’ lives.

Walsh would like to see category breakdowns similar to those for inground pools — by shape, gallonage, with and without decks. Then, he says, more retailers would participate, which would gain more exposure for the product.

“Right now, it’s a Catch-22,” Walsh says. “The industry beats [aboveground-pool retailers] down and tells them they’re not worth it; the retailers believe it and then they don’t enter the contest. But the industry and NSPI should lead the way and say, ‘Let’s give this part of the industry more credibility.’”

NSPI Chief Staff Executive Jack Cergol says the organization used to have three aboveground-pool categories in its design competition, but had to combine them into one category when retailers didn’t participate.

“The situation is that we don’t receive a whole lot of entries in the category,” he says. “We would like to get more entries in the aboveground section and, depending upon how many we get and what they portray the product as, we could even break out more categories.

“We just had eight entries last year,” Cergol says. “If we could get 100 to 125 entries, then we would have to look at how they’re designed, what the layout is and how they’re put into the backyard. Then we’d have to look at it very carefully.”

But they also have to look at it differently, say some retailers. Rowlen says the association and its judges need to see the product for what it is and judge it accordingly. “You can’t look for the same things you’re going to look for on an inground,” she adds. “You can’t look for the $1 million home because it’s not going to be there.”