For first time in 26 years, the Henderson YMCA will be looking for a new leader

HENDERSON, Ky. — The YMCA that Sheldon Booze took over as executive director and CEO in 1996 would be scarcely recognizable today.

The Henderson County Family YMCA’s building at 460 Klutey Park Plaza is three times the size of the facility Booze first laid eyes on. Its membership is 3½ times what it was a quarter-century ago (and, before Covid, was five times bigger).

The Y today features activities and technology unthought-of in the mid-1990s: Weightlifting machines that can communicate with a user’s smartphone app. Fitness and cycling classes led by virtual instructors. Pickleball.

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Now, Booze is preparing to retire this spring after 26 years here, Henderson’s longest tenure of a YMCA director — two years longer than that of Bill Heib, who served at the old Y in Downtown Henderson from 1948 to 1972 — having overseen some of the greatest evolutions at the Y’s more than 125-year history here.

“I didn’t make all these things happen,” Booze said during an interview. “It was ‘we.’ I was just honored to be able to lead the organization.”

He credited a collection of constituencies that were vital to the Y’s success, including:

Staff: “I had great department heads, everyone with 10, 20, 30 years” of experience, Booze said.

Health and wellness coordinator Annette Garrison has worked part-time with the Y for 27 years; the now-retired Cathy Bullock spent some 30 years as membership director during a period of tremendous growth.

Then there have also been long-serving employees such as Kathie Pullum, who for three decades has been a popular leader of group exercise and Silver Sneaker classes, and Vickie Brown, who spent 44 years at the service desk greeting members and visitors until she retired several years ago.

Volunteers: “We have had a strong board,” Booze said. “They didn’t micromanage.”

The Y has also benefitted from folks who volunteered as youth sport coaches or helpers at swim meets and other events.

Donors: The Y has flourished with the help of generous donations from benefactors such as Walt Dear, Leo and Gail King and the Preston Family Foundation as well as a variety of businesses and industries.

Making the difference

Still, there’s no question that the YMCA facility here has undergone transformation after transformation during Booze’s tenure.

“The Y has done very well,” over the past quarter-century, said Tore Stuen, who has been chairman of the local Y board since 2002 and was on the committee that hired Booze. “He’s the one who spearheaded the initial capital campaign for expanding and established our financial security.

“Financially we were not very secure in 1996,” Stuen said. “He got all that started — collaborations with community leaders” with support from community activist and former mayor Joan Hoffman, who had served as the Y’s interim director.

From the start, Booze literally had to deal with a leaky roof at the Y.

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“When I got there for (his job) interview, there was a plastic bin on the service desk” to catch rainwater, he said. “There were paint chips falling on the main pool into the water” from the ceiling.

“It was a mess,” Booze said. “As the old saying goes, generally, ‘Only one way to go: up.’”

He very nearly didn’t become a Y director at all. Booze, a native of Maine, was a track star. He was a five-time Maine State High School and AAU champion in cross-country and the mile as well as a three-time state champion runner-up. He at one point had the second-fastest two-mile indoor time (9:06) for Springfield College in Massachusetts, served as a course official for the 1988 USA Men’s Olympic Marathon Trials and ran road races against world-class Olympians Bill Rogers, Joan Benoit Samuelson and Bruce Bickford.

As a young man, he envisioned himself as a P.E. teacher and track and cross-country coach. But while waiting to meet with his college teaching advisor, he saw a YMCA flyer on a nearby table. Within six months, he was hired as CEO of a non-facility YMCA in his hometown; he would go on to spend 11 years there and head up the construction of its first building in 1990.

After a stint as a CEO of a Y in Maryland, he landed the Henderson job in 1996.

26 years of improvements

Booze undertook 196 building improvements and expansions here, starting with a $260,000 roof replacement project.

Not long after came construction of a new teen/adult fitness center, which today is part of a three-room wing of treadmills and other cardio equipment, weightlifting machines and free weights.

In the spring of 1997, strong winds tore a vent off the top of an inflatable bubble that covered a pair of tennis courts behind the Y during cold seasons. “It started deflating,” Booze said. “It sounded like a shotgun going off.”

“I ran back to my office and pulled out the insurance policy,” he said. To his great relief, “It was insured for the value of replacement, like $300,000.” That set the stage for construction of a multi-recreation center that enclosed the tennis courts, a new walking track and an adjacent aerobics room.

“I got a lot of grief when we put in the track around the tennis courts” by tennis players who thought they would be distracted by walkers and joggers, Booze said. But he thinks the tennis community has grown accustomed to the arrangement. At any rate, “We get far more walkers and joggers than tennis players,” he said.

More improvements followed in quick succession: A wooden gym floor that replaced a deteriorating tile floor. Remodeling a former fitness center into a women’s locker room. A youth gym. A second addition to the fitness center. Replacement of aging Nautilus weight machines with Cybex equipment. A warm-water therapy pool that was much appreciated by folks with arthritis. New parking lots.

Adding programming

But it wasn’t just bricks-and-mortar; the Y continually introduced new programs. Garrison brought in the Zumba dance-themed fitness class and kickboxing “before even Evansville jumped on the bandwagon,” Booze said. Tabata and yoga classes were added. The Silver Sneakers program was introduced for older adults. Live and virtual indoor cycling classes were added along with live and virtual Les Mills fitness classes. About five years ago, the Y here began offering indoor pickleball, which is especially popular among older adults.

There’s also a host of youth-oriented programs: Summer day camps, Tae Kwon Do classes, youth basketball and soccer leagues, T-Ball, girls volleyball and so on.

“Everything we did was requested by large numbers of members,” Booze said.

Adding members

The new facilities and programs spurred membership growth. Booze said when he came to Henderson, the Y had about 2,000 members; before the Covid pandemic, that had grown five-fold to more than 10,000 members, many of whom enjoyed corporate membership discounts through their employers.

In terms of per capita membership, “We have one of the highest penetrations of Ys in the country,” he said. “In 2005 we were third in the country in penetration.”

Covid took a toll. The Y now counts 7,070 members, including 1,660 youth, 3,505 adults and 1,879 seniors. Booze said membership is slowly rebounding.

Membership growth along with generous donors meant the Y was able to make improvements and expand. “Membership drove it all,” Booze said. “It’s where we get the vast percentage of our revenue.”

But the Y during his tenure also practiced fiscal discipline. Booze was honored year after year for budget management among the nation’s Y directors. “They stopped (giving the award) because the same nine or 10 (directors) kept getting it every year,” he said. “I think I got it 10 years in a row.”

Having a broad membership base helped the Y keep a lid on price increases. “We have the same (indoor tennis) court fee we had in 2000” at $15 per hour,” Booze said. “Our philosophy was, we don’t raise rates unless we absolutely have to. We raised rates $1 per month when other Ys had to raise rates $3, $5. We haven’t raised rates going on six years.”

Yet the Henderson Y is able to award financial aid to thousands of people with limited income each year. “Because of our financial organization, we never had to worry about that,” Booze said.

Avoiding debt

Facility improvements continued. In 2007 alone, the Y installed a new rooftop HVAC unit, purchased 16 cycling bikes and acquired new Cybex machines and cardio equipment.

The following year, the Y constructed an $860,000 social and recreation addition just off the front lobby, providing games and study space largely intended for teens and youngsters.

In all, the Y documents 196 construction and facility improvements totaling nearly $7.3 million from mid-1998 through September 2021, all without borrowing any money.

“We did not want to borrow money or owe any debt,” Booze said. “We could have gone out and borrowed $8 million. But we decided early on we were going to build when we had the money for it.”

That puts the Henderson Y in rarefied company. “When we get the national reports, I doubt there’s 5% of Ys without any debt,” he said.

That’s not to say there aren’t challenges. The Covid pandemic shut down the Y for 2½ months starting March 18, 2020; afterward, there were varying mask mandates for staff and members that weren’t fun to enforce.

Since Covid, it’s been harder to hire folks, including part-time class instructors. “Because of staff shortages, there are not as many class offerings as we had pre-Covid,” Booze said. (The availability of “virtual” cycling and Les Mills classes that are led by filmed professional trainers shown on large-screen TVs supplements the “live” classes led by in-person instructors, though live classes remain especially popular.)

He was determined to remain at the helm during the difficult past couple of years. “I was not going to retire during Covid,” Booze said.

Time to retire

But with the pandemic hopefully subsiding, he said the time has come for him to retire. He turns 65 this year, and he and his wife, Laurie, have an infant grandson here. “The little fellow will be crawling in three or four months, and we want to help with child care,” he said. “This will be a good time for have a new person come in” at the Y.

Booze looks back with pride at how the Henderson County Family YMCA has progressed over his tenure.

“We’ve obviously got a much-improved facility and programs and services we didn’t have” in 1996, he said.

Booze is pleased that the Y has sustained continuous improvement. “We’ve just been able to do so much over a period of time,” he said. “A lot of Ys, if they do a fairly major capital addition, they do it once every 10 or 15 years” instead of making incremental improvements every year.

“More than one thing” that’s been accomplished over the past quarter-century, Booze said, “it’s really everything. It just kept rolling.”

Looking ahead

As for the future, board Chairman Stuen said the Y has launched a national search for a new CEO with the help of the YMCA of the USA, although he said it’s possible that a local resident who hasn’t worked for a YMCA but has the appropriate management, financial and fundraising experience, would be considered. It will be accepting resumes until March 18.

Stuen believes the Henderson County Family YMCA will be an attractive organization for prospective CEOs.

“We’re in a good position,” he said. “We’re financially secure and membership is slowly recovering from Covid.

“It should be a very interesting Y for someone to consider.”

This article originally appeared on Henderson Gleaner: Sheldon Booze retiring as Henderson YMCA's longest-serving CEO