IN THE NEWS

Splish Splash, Hospitality 2003 MVP, By Michael Gasparino

Summer Job Candidates Just Surfed And Clicked, By Stacy Albin

Kidsday, Kidsday Reporter, By Kevin Wang, Elsie Yau and Victoria Tum

All Wet: 7 Top U.S Water Parks, The Washington Post, By Anne McDonough

Taking the Plunge, Which splash parks rock – and which are all wet

Teenager and Friends Love Splish Splash, By Molly Kom

Splish Splash
Hospitality – 2003 MVP
By Michael Gasparino

At around number six, Chip Cleary started getting worried.

The president and founder of Splish Splash was watching The Travel Channel’s program on the Top 10 water parks in America, a list that included Splish Splash. Or so he was told.

“When they called us up and told us they were doing a Top 10 water park show and that were in the Top 10, they wouldn’t tell us what number we were,” said Cleary. “And we really thought we would be number 10 or number nine, and we were thrilled with that – little old Splish Splash on Long Island?”

So as Cleary, general manager Bob Amoruso, and others watched, the program counted down the top parks. “They did number 10 and we weren’t in it, they did nine and we weren’t in it,” Cleary said, getting more nervous with each passing park. “And at six, I panicked and said I guess they dropped us, because who was left? Disney, Paramount-these big companies. So when it came on and we were the number five water park in America – we were absolutely stunned.”

After a 2002 season that was the best in the park’s history, the nomination proved what Cleary and his team have known all along – that Splish Splash is a world-class family entertainment destination. “That was a defining moment for Splish Splash,” Cleary said. “It’s actually beyond my wildest dreams.”

Set on 96 acres off exit 72 of the Long Island Expressway, the park has become extremely popular among Long Islanders and city residents, an oasis on the East End. “This is a vacation for a day for people coming in,” said Amoruso, who joined the staff in the 13-year-old park’s second year. “When they enter those gates they should be transported to a different world and have a spectacular day.”

An emphasis on safety, attention to detail, cleanliness and listening to the guests have been key to the park’s growth, but Cleary said Splish Splash is also different in a significant way. “This is one of the few water parks in America that is really an amusement park with water rides,” said Cleary, who had previously been with Adventureland in Farmingdale. “So you’ll find a lot of personality here, a lot of storytelling, games, a big accent on food, presentation, shows – I think the main thing that separates us from the crowd, besides our lovely site, is that we went down a different path right from the beginning.”

The customer is always right, and one thing that park-goers asked for was an exciting thrill ride. Enter Hollywood Stunt Rider, which opened last year to rave reviews. Four people barrel down a 50-foot tall, 450-foot long, completely enclosed, nine-foot diameter black tube with a steep drop. And entertaining the guests on line is legendary film director Irving Fabrizio, an animatronic figure who auditions guests for his latest cinematic blockbuster.

It’s one of 25 different water rides at the park, which also features a diving show and a tropical bird revue. “One thing that people don’t realize is when you build the front of the house bigger – with another ride or attraction – you have to make the back of the house bigger,” Cleary said. To that end, the park expanded its parking to about 25 acres, and there are plans for another hit ride in the near future. “Rides change so quickly, we just block out the land and don’t pencil in the attraction until about a year and a half before because the products are changing very quickly with new concepts and ideas.”

The park has reached out to community groups and charitable organizations, including the Make-A-Wish foundation. “We do a day where everyone on the Make-A-Wish roster comes here for free. They come in early, have some peaceful time without the regular guests here, and we have a special high dive show just for them,” Cleary said. “It’s part of an ongoing support situation with the community. The community has supported us tremendously over the years; they’ve allowed us to grow and prosper, and so we look for opportunities to give back.”

The park is open from Memorial Day through Labor Day and employs about 800 in season, but the operation is a year-round commitment, with planning in the winter months and recovery in the fall. “It’s a gigantic production, and once it gets rolling it goes on 24 hours a day,” said Cleary. “You have no life for three months of the year – none, zero, zilch. It’s a very demanding job. It’s a lot of fun, a lot of energy, but it’s also dealing with two very important things – safety and the public.”

Yet Cleary wouldn’t trade it in for anything. “When we came out here, the euphoria of the project starting was usurped by me waking up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘I’m on the East End building a large scale attraction, and everyone I talk to says, What? Where?’ There were many sleepless nights,” Cleary said. “But in 1991 on a wonderfully  hot May day when we opened and the park was almost filled to capacity on the first day, I guess the dreams right away become reality.”

Summer Job Candidates Just Surfed And Clicked
By Stacy Albin

Bob Amoruso, the general manager of the Splish Splash water park in Riverhead, says the park has received a healthy number of applications for summer employment. Of the more than 2,000 applications, about half came in from the company’s Web site.

“The big, big thing the last couple of years has been online applications,” said Mr. Amoruso, who added that online applications had increased 100 percent in the last two years.

Jeff Esposito, a spokesperson for the Long Island Ducks baseball team, agreed that Internet job hunting had replaced help-wanted window signs and handwritten applications. Mr. Esposito said he had printed out a six-inch stack of e-mail messages from applicants, ranging from teenagers to the elderly. “Everybody is online,” he said.

The increase in online applications comes as no surprise to employers. The children who learned to maneuver a computer mouse at the same time they learned to read are now old enough to hold a job. Many adults who had to learn to use computers have had time to practice their new skills. And programs for older students are teaching computer essentials.

While technology has made it easier for applicants of any age to look for jobs, employers say that they benefit, too. Mr. Esposito said that it was easy to pass an e-mail inquiry to the correct department and know that it could be found at any time.

Mr. Amoruso said that before Internet applications, most job seekers either lived nearby or were summer residents who had to wait until Memorial Day, when they arrived at their summer homes, to stop by to fill out a job application. With the advent of online job hunting, there is no need to be in the area to make initial contact or fill out an application.

As company Web sites have grown more sophisticated, creating a page with details about employment is not much of a chore. Often such a page will provide a photo of a typical work space and a job description, including salary, Mr. Amoruso said. With such information readily available, applicants can decide whether to apply without leaving home, he said.

Online capabilities have also resulted in more applications, Mr. Amoruso said. Four years ago, Splish Splash received 1,600 to 1,700 applications a year, submitted online and in person; now it’s 2,200.

But Mr. Amoruso said that the influx of resumes illustrated more than technological advances – it was also a sign of a strengthening seasonal economy with healthy competition for positions that pay better than minimum wage.

Lifeguards at Splish Splash, for example, earn $7.75 an hour to start. And those jobs – about 250 of them – go fast, said Mr. Amoruso, noting that the company’s training program, which includes 20 hours of pool and classroom instruction followed by skill-review classes, helps weed out those who are attracted to the job for its perceived glamour.

It’s hard to come by employment statistics that incorporate season workers and their pay. But the State Labor Department says the number of jobs and the wages for summer temporary workers have risen in recent years.

Summer employment fell off after 9/11, but overall wages have increased since 2000, when 12,181 people who worked in all varieties of temporary jobs between July and September in Nassau and Suffolk Counties earned an average of $5,967. In 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, slightly more than 8,100 people worked in such jobs, an increase of about 3 percent over the previous years, and they earned an average of $8,405.

Lori Farley-Toth, a vice president at Adecco, a staffing company in Melville, said that employers are expanding their payrolls. “We have had an increase in seasonal work – especially in production and distribution,” she said.

Those jobs often pay a bit better than the typical season job. For instance, Ms. Farley-Toth said that one of her company’s clients is hiring workers to package cosmetics in Christmas boxes, and paying above minimum wage, which in New York State is $6 an hour (the federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour).

For that company, which Ms. Farley-Toth declined to name, seasonal work means preparing for the end-of-year holidays. “The only way it’s going to get to the customer before Thanksgiving is if it’s produced and shipped now,” Ms. Farley-Toth said. “Otherwise, you miss the market.”

Ms. Farley-Toth said that the expansion of payrolls had gone beyond hiring temporary workers for the season at hand. Indeed, figures from the State Labor Department released in early June show that the number of full- and part-time jobs in the private sector on Long Island had grown by about 13,900 in the last year, to 1.05 million.

“My experience, thank goodness, is there seems to be an increase in demand all across industry lines,” Ms. Farley-Toth said. Employers are looking for accountants, she said, while employment agencies are searching for recruiters.

But such heavy demand apparently hasn’t reached teenagers, who generally fill unskilled positions cheaply. George Gorman, a spokesman for the State Parks Department, said that most of the 2,000 seasonal employees who work in the state parks system on Long Island are high school and college students.

“We really haven’t had problems attracting people in recent years,” he said, adding that the pay scales range from $6 an hour for a park and recreation aide to $12.56 for a lifeguard. “We have hit all of our summertime staffing levels.”

Recruitment wasn’t quite as easy in the 1990’s, when the economy was booming. Companies were hiring teenagers to fill summer openings for office work, and teenagers were forsaking traditional seasonal jobs are jumping at the offers, hoping to build their resumes. To compete, the Parks Department sent teams of recruiters to college job fairs as far away as Cortland in upstate New York, Mr. Gorman said.

No longer. There are plenty of available candidates locally, he said, and the department now sends representatived only to a few job fairs on Long Island, while providing school guidance counselors with information about available positions.

Mr. Gorman said that it was rare not to find a qualified applicant for a particular position. Even latecomers might get a job, he said.

“Right now, we are hiring,” he said, adding that the parks system’s full-time operations only began on June 25. “Unless someone applies very late, we’re able to accommodate them.”

It’s never too early to start thinking about your “senior” trip. Our school lets us take one each year. If you were allowed to help plan your own trip, where would you go? We surveyed 100 kids in our school, and here is what we found out:

Splish Splash – 52
Hershey Park – 36
Club Getaway – 10
Rye Playland – 2

Most kids want to go to a great amusement park, and we liked Splish Splash in Riverhead the best. That was followed by Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, Club Getaway in Connecticut and Rye Playland in Westchester. Splish Splash was popular because it is a great water park.  Most schools in Nassau, Suffolk and Queens can get there in just a few hours. We thought Hershey Park would be the most popular because it’s the chocolate place, and it has lots of cool rides, but it came in second.

Last summer more than 70 million people cooled off at U.S. water parks, according to the World Waterpark Association. Here are seven standouts scattered across the United States that are generally considered to be among the nation’s best (check out www.waterparks.org to find other parks). For folks who’d rather stay dry, we’ve included other points of interest in the area.

Splish Splash (Riverhead, N.Y.)
Why it’s special: This 50-acre park offers 24 slides and several daily shows by high divers and avian athletes competing in the Bird Olympics.

What’s there: Dragon’s Den, a two-person slide with a 45-foot drop and a mist-spewing dragon, debuted this summer, and the Giant Twister has you floating by the treetops. A Surf City wave pool, kiddie speed slide and a Pirate’s Cove with water cannons and climbing ropes make this park particularly family-friendly.

What’s nearby: Riverhead – 60 miles east of New York City on Long Island – is home to Atlantis Marine World, where you can see sharks and sting rays… Take the tour and wine-taste at Martha Clara Vineyards (one of many vineyards in the area)… Stop at one of many pick-your-own farm stands.

Info: 631-727-3600, www.splishsplashlongisland.com

It’s hot, it’s humid – but as we head into dog days of summer, the same old pool or stretch of shore may not be as enticing as there were six weeks ago.

That’s why people created splash parks, where the words “wet” and “wild” go hand in hand. Or, at least, they should. But not all parks are created equal. Some offer more thrills for your buck, others are cleaner and at least one was, well, all wet.

Word to the wise: The lines are shorter on weekdays, especially overcast ones. You can even splash around in the rain, though thunder and lightning will close the park.

Our chlorine-resistant testers put their bodies on the line at four parks, all of them two hours or less from Manhattan. Here’s how they rated, from one to four stars – the more stars, the splashier the fun.

Splish Splash
*** ½
Friendly, clean and well-staffed, Splish Splash is a scream – one big, wet party. If it were a little closer to the city, we’d probably give it four stars.

The latest thrill is the Dragon’s Den. Hold onto your raft and you’ll be propelled 50 feet through a water-filled spiral tube. You spin down, down, down – and just when you think it’s over, you spin several more times before coming face to face with a 30-foot-high dragon – which spits water at you.

The park has a sense of humor. At the Hollywood Stunt ride, you’re mocked by a talking string-puppet, which plays the role of director. Then you’re bombarded with water cannons, and finally shoved into a huge, gloomy and twisty water slide.

The Monsoon Lagoon – crammed with water slides, hideaways and ropes for climbing – is a big hit with little kids, who also have two pools and a Pirate Cove pretty much to themselves.

Afraid of making a splash yourself? Catch the High Dive Show, where a daring soul jumps from 80 feet during the finale; and the “Fowlympics,” featuring birds doing Olympian feats.

All told, it’s a great day out. 

Teenager and Friends Love Splish Splash
By Molly Kom

Splish Splash voted Best of the Best:
in Dan's Papers' Readers Choice Awards

Splish Splash, a place of thrills and fun. As you drive by the park you can see the tops of slides high above the trees, and you think to yourself, “Am I really going to go down that?” A certain type of fear goes through you at first. Then when it fades, you realize that you are in for a day of fun and adventure.

From the moment I walked into the water park in Riverhead, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, it was hard to decide which ride, or slide to go down first. I soon realized that it is impossible to make a bad choice because they are all fun. I was surrounded by my best friends at the theme park, which also made the experience fun. In fact, that is the key to having a good time at Splish Splash.

The friends you bring with you really determine what kind of time you are going to have there. Good friends make the experience even better than going alone. The first ride I went on at Splish Splash, I shared in a double tube with my friend. The name of the ride is known as “The Abyss.” I was a little nervous about the ride since I have not been to Splish Splash since the 3rd grade. Going on it with my friend helped me prepare myself for going on other, scarier rides alone.

It is a good idea to go with an even number of your friends including yourself. This is a good idea since a lot of Splish Splash’s rides are two or more person rides. The upside to having an even number of people is that you won’t get stuck on a two-person ride with a hairy old man that smells funny even though he has been in the water all day. Trust me, that’s not fun.

As the day went on I was getting more and more comfortable on the rides. But just when I thought I could survive anything, there was always something bigger and scarier that I needed my friends to lure me into going on. That’s when it is also good to have friends with you. Not only as riding buddies, but for moral support.

At Splish Splash, the biggest, scariest slide they have is called “Cliff Diver,” which is a vertical drop of 80 feet that takes many flights of stairs to get to the top. After riding the slide however, I learned that the slide is not the scary part. Interestingly, the walk to the top is far more frightening. The fear that goes through your body as you walk up, step by step, is more of a rush than actually going down it. You look at the slide and think to yourself, “I can’t do this, what am I thinking?”

As I turned around to leave because I was too scared, my good buddy Dhruva stopped me. He has gone down it a million times and was showing no fear at all. Also, seeing little 5-year-olds behind him gave me a little confidence boost too. The little boys told me that it wasn’t bad and that they had gone down it three times already.

At this point I realized that I was only about 10 steps from the top platform and I could see the top of the slide. I saw someone lay down, and then in an instant, they were gone. Suddenly my friend Rachel laid down and started to push herself to the edge of the slide and started to scream. That made me laugh a little bit and I felt a lot calmer because she hadn’t even moved yet. She stopped screaming and I watcher her go down to the bottom. I knew I was next in line. Nervously, I sat down and closed my eyes. I even pushed myself down the slide, and when I opened my eyes, I was at the bottom, and the only thing I felt was the incredible wedgie I got from going extremely fast. I must have blacked out, because I don’t remember going down the slide, just getting off it.

As I started to go down other rides I realized nothing was as bad as the fear I had just encountered on “Cliff Diver.” So I was getting a little hungry.

Splish Splash has a wide variety of food to eat, but the best thing in my opinion is Dip ‘n Dots ice cream. Dip ‘n Dots are little balls of frozen ice cream and they taste really good. I can thank my friend Josie for introducing them to me, and if you decide to go to Splish Splash, trust me, you want them. After my friends and I ate, we didn’t want to go on any really fast rides because we didn’t want to get sick. The best ride to go on after eat is “The Lazy River.” Basically you sit in a tube and let the current pull you around a river that circles the entire park. You can use this as a good time to digest whatever it is you ate for lunch.

When my friends and I first saw The Lazy River, we thought that we wouldn’t go on it because it looked boring. But after going on it once, we couldn’t get enough of it. It turns out it is pretty fun, and once again, if you are there with your friends it’s ten times better. We started racing to see who could get to the end first, and see how long we could make a chain. It was very fun.

My day at Splish Splash was amazing. The thrill of big slides and the simple enjoyment of relaxing with your friends gives you a feeling that is indescribable. Though I may live on Long Island and have the privilege of going to the ocean, everyone needs a day at Splish Splash.

Splish Splash is located at 2549 Splish Splash Drive in Riverhead. Call 727-3600 for more information.