Dear Tom Brady: Winter Pool Covers CAN Come in White

Smartpool Aug Sq

Tom Brady has once again made headlines — not for football, but for his winter safety cover.

As Brady fights his four-game suspension ruling for his role in the Deflategate scandal, a massive collection of his emails has been made public — and it turns out, there’s some pretty interesting stuff in there.

Last October, the NFL quarterback looked into getting a winter safety cover for the backyard. Upon learning the cost of the cover ($8,300) and the installation ($240) would set him back $8,540, the multimillionaire balked — and wondered, as many of your own customers do, why the retractable cover he currently had wouldn’t suffice. Read the entire exchange here.

After accepting he would indeed need a new cover, he requested white; a nice thought, given how the cover would blend in with the New England snow.

But as you might already suspect, white wasn’t available. (That also didn’t sit well with Brady.) {bglink 4632}

Here at AQUA, we’ve done dozens of stories on winter pool covers, from product roundups to installation tips and sales advice. But this story prompted a question: If someone, say, a super rich football player, wanted a white winter pool cover, could he get one? (Spoiler: yes.)

“We can make a solid safety cover out of any color material, but the material colors stocked by our vinyl supplier are based on demand in the marketplace. We had a similar request for a large commercial safety cover last year but because white isn’t a stock color, the supplier of the material needed a minimum quantity to be ordered, much more than was needed, making it cost-prohibitive for one safety cover,” says Brian Naumann, manager at Pen Fabricators, which manufacturers winter covers and liners for swimming pools.

"My guess is that white isn’t a popular color because it doesn’t hide dirt,” Naumann says. “Safety covers are not only created to make a closed pool safe in the winter, but also to make a backyard look better in the winter. A dirty, white safety cover isn’t attractive and homeowners don’t want to worry about cleaning the cover in the winter.  Most winter covers are darker in color because it hides dirt and keeps the pool looking sharp in the backyard during the winter months. Many homes are designed with the pool as the center piece to large windows that look out on a pool year-round, so having a cover that makes the yard look good in the winter is key.”

There you have it. And in case you were wondering, Brady, at the behest of wife Gisele Bundchen, went with a grey cover.

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