Merrimack Valley YMCA

This Y is a Great place to workout and nice and clean And Has a Nice Friendly staff and Since I move from North Andover To Haverhill and Joined the Northshore YMCA here I think That all The Ymca Have The Most Friendliest and Caring staff and I feel so Comfortable working out Here and So if Your Looking for A Place to Workout Give The YMCA A Try you will be Glad You Did

It’s a very family friendly sports club with lots of programs and activities constantly in session.

This is my home pool. I learned to tread water in it. I did face-​flops in it. I played in it. [I peed in it.] This was all well and good, back when, if you showed up without your porous and useless Spandex swimcap during the Free Swim, this one really cool lifeguard would stand up on a bleacher with a spare rubber cap full of water then DROP it on your head so it would invert and stick right to it… yes, those were the good days.
As an adult attempting to swim laps, this is now an unremarkable and sometimes disconcertingly murky pool (piss? geriatric skin cells? lotion?) filled with senior citizens, Chinese ladies doing taichi in the water (not being racist; it’s just a fact), and people from the past (parents’ acquaintances, neighbors, friends’ parents… you get the idea) who are really freaking awkward to run into in a Speedo.
Plus, the membership fee is only slightly cheaper than that of most private gyms, and an effort to plead economic distress only equips you with a stack of papers that looks like a college application. I guess if I REALLY couldn’t afford to swim here, I would have filled it out. But then I moved out of the town, and there was the end of that.
But like I said; home pool, mustn’t diss it to hard. To this day, walking in through the doors reminds me of my long-​gone youth — days of gymnastics and ballet and tap and being a «Minnow» in swim class — summer days at camp, winter evenings with a grouchy parent waiting in a hail-​covered car to pick me up… yes, yes, long live the MV YMCA.