If you’ve ever utilized a city facility for whatever activity does it for you, Monique Kovacs may have played a role in your fun.
Or your kids’ fun. Or maybe even your grandkids’ fun!
As manager of customer service for the last nine years, she spent the previous 25 years in the city’s recreation department in various roles, helping to make those facilities and their programs as people-friendly as possible.
Kovacs was already starting to do that as a youngster, she tells BarrieToday.
“I grew up in Barrie and had a lot of interaction with recreation,” she says. “I was a daily participant at the Lions Pool, summer playgrounds at the schools, and worked as a student for the aquatics division.”
That was followed by a bachelor's degree in physical and health education with an emphasis in recreation and leisure.
“It was always on my radar as a possible career,” Kovacs says of working in recreation, adding a stint at a Toronto seniors home led to a job opening with the city back in Barrie.
It was June 1988: Barrie’s population was around 45,000 (it’s about 151,000 now, give or take). Mayor Ross Archer was in his last year in the big chair and Janice Laking would be voted in that fall for her first of many terms.
“She was my Grade 9 guidance counsellor at Barrie North,” Kovacs says matter-of-factly of Laking.
Kovacs’ experience helped her land the seniors centre recreation programmer job at the Allandale Recreation Centre that spring.
“I had also previously worked as a summer student in 1983 and 1984 as a lifeguard and aquatics supervisor when the centre first opened, so I was familiar with the building to a certain point,” she says. “But the new seniors’ centre was part of an extensive expansion which included the Olympic-sized rink and new fitness rooms, etc. It was a pretty exciting time.”
There would be more of those exciting times for her.
Kovacs says she's proud of her contributions to recreation in the city, including overseeing the building up of the summer camps program from a limited six-week service for a few hundred children to a thriving full-summer program with more than 3,500 participants. Those expanded into March break and Christmas offerings as well.
She oversaw the designing and opening of the Maple Avenue Youth Centre, the East Bayfield and Holly community centres (the latter now known as Peggy Hill Team Community Centre) and the associated expansion of community programs to include adult sports leagues, expanded dedicated pre-school programs, drop in programs for the whole community, dedicated youth centre, skating and dance programs.
When Kovacs “took the leap to the corporate side” in 2013, her idea well hadn’t run dry yet and she has left her mark as manager of customer service in many ways.
“The thing I enjoyed the most about my time with the city was the people,” the soon-to-be-retiree says. “They were a team of dedicated professionals who truly cared about offering services to the growing community. And there was so much growth, and that meant there was always a new project or new challenge to think through and find a solution for.
“Often the biggest challenge was finding funding to start up the programs and meet demand and then working through new budgets to balance the revenues and expenses to keep budgets in line.
“It was always a balancing act to get the best bang for the buck to serve the community.”
