Last Friday 30^th May, we said farewell to Stella Farr after 26 years of her hard work and commitment working in our aquatics and coached programmes team.

Stella worked out of seven different locations in her time and originally started out with Aberdeen City Council, prior to Sport Aberdeen becoming a registered charity and arms length organisation in 2010.

From starting out in a storage cupboard behind the lifts on the 5^th floor of St Nicholas House (four people crammed into a tiny space!) to latterly working at Sport Aberdeen’s open, bright and spacious HQ on the 4^th Floor of the Kings Church building in Bridge of Don, Stella has seen it all.    

One of Stella’s standout moments was when Sport Aberdeen won Scottish Swimming’s ‘Learn to Swim Provider of the Year’ award in 2017 – the inaugural year in front of a celebratory home crowd in Aberdeen.

Stella’s team view her as the ‘go to person’ for any problems as her knowledge is unparalleled. To put it into perspective, here are some approximate numbers of Stella’s achievements:

• Personally allocated over 20,000 participants into classes
• Over 150,000 calls made and answered
• Written over 100,000 individual emails in the last 10 years
• And in the days before the online On Course platform – stuffed over 10,000 envelopes (the stuffing machine was always broken!)

Above L-R: Dianne Breen, Stella Far and Keith Heslop (CEO)

Dianne Breen, Coached Programmes Manager and Stella’s former boss, said: “Stella was on sabbatical when I took on the Aquatics team in 2009 and I was pretty intimidated by her reputation — I heard stories about her straight-talking, no-nonsense approach and her ability to call out incompetence from a mile away.

“What I found was that yes, she is fierce. Yes, she has the uncanny ability to spot a problem before it even happens. And yes, she holds everyone — and I mean everyone — to her impossibly high standards. But what I didn’t expect was just how much heart she has for this job, for the people she works with, and, most importantly, for teaching people to swim.

“She’s the AI of coached programmes — fast, accurate and basically knows everything. But she’s also got this huge heart, and it’s the passion she has for her work that makes her so fabulous.

“She’s sharp, quick-witted and often has us in stitches, whether she’s recounting an interaction with a customer or just giving someone that look when they ask a ridiculous question or frustrate her. We all know the look!

“One of her most memorable phone calls was a customer she had been chasing for a while over unpaid debt. The customer advised that he didn’t need to pay the required amount as he had an agreement in place over how he was going to repay the debt – when Stella asked who this agreement was with, he confidently advised the agreement was with himself.

“When Stella repeated out loud “so you made the agreement with yourself?”, the whole team just about hit the floor – the perks of an open plan office!”

Dianne recalls another one of Stella’s many entertaining interactions:

“Stella was trying to chase a customer for payment but they had SO many excuses – ‘on the bus’, ‘don’t have my card’, ‘can’t speak just now’, ‘I’m on the way to doctors with my daughter who’s got diarrhoea’ – Stella kindly reminded the customer that this had been ongoing for weeks, only to be met with the customer’s response: ‘don’t you have a heart?’. 

“That struck a chord as Stella was going through treatment for heart problems. Phil, another member of the team, was leaving Sport Aberdeen at the time and as he left, he told Stella that she was the kindest heartless person he’d ever known.  

“It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for Stella; she had her fair share of health challenges over the years, but in true Stella fashion, she just takes a moment, resets herself and gets back to it. She’s the same with work challenges, whether it’s a restructure (there’s been a few!) or pool closures, she faces them all with resilience.

“She’s been the glue that’s held us together, even when it felt like we had never ending paperwork, emails, phone messages dealing with covid and primary payers and direct debits… the list goes on.”

Everyone from Sport Aberdeen wishes Stella all the best for her retirement and will miss her loads!