Teamwork helps ensure the safety of Aviator Sports & Recreation

Located in four historic airplane hangers at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, the aptly named Aviator Sports and Recreation offers over 107,000 square feet of fun and games, including indoor turfs for team sports, basketball courts, two regulation ice rinks, and a gymnastics center as well as retail shops and a sports bar. Special events include Golden Glove Boxing, corporate teambuilding and community-oriented concerts. The complex, about ten miles from downtown Manhattan, is part of Gateway National Recreation Area.

Security at this bustling facility requires some of the same attributes as the athletes who visit:  teamwork and flexibility.   Salvatore Musumeci, Aviator’s Director of Security, oversees a team of 14 Securitas officers who are so vital to the center’s operations and activities that they seem to him like Aviator employees.  He appreciates the officers’ willingness to pitch in and help wherever needed. “We’re all one team and we all help each other out,” he says.

Officers must be able to interact not only to a variety of situations but also a diverse urban population of all ages.   On Friday nights, Aviator hosts teen nights for local youth.    As Musumeci puts it, officers on his team “need to be adopted moms and dads.”  The most frequent security concern is handling injuries.  Officers must be able to quickly and competently provide first aid, calm the athlete, notify emergency personnel when needed, inform the parents in the case of an unsupervised teen, and prepare facility incident reports in regards.

“This is not a ‘stand in the hallway and be a statue’ type of facility,” says Musumeci.  “You come here and you interact with different people every day.”

Aviator Sports has been using Securitas since February 2007.  In that time, Musumeci has developed a particularly effective partnership with his local Branch Manager Delfin Maldonado Jr.  “I love the guy.  He’s great and he listens – which is important – and we developed a nice team.”  He also provides solutions.  Aviator’s location is somewhat remote from local subway and bus stops, which sometimes led to problems for employees waiting to get home late at night.  Working together, Aviator and Securitas re-established an employee shuttle – complete with a pool of Securitas-trained drivers.  “It was a situation where (the branch manager) said ‘what can we do.’  Now it works like a charm.”

Musumeci, a retired New York Police Department detective, is also impressed with the way Securitas’ recruits, trains and takes care of their employees.  “They invest in their people.  They provide enough gear to make them look sharp and presentable and more than enough training.”  Last September, a Securitas officer helped Musumeci defuse a situation with a mentally unstable visitor, which could have ended dangerously.  “Nobody got hurt and it was great work from the guard,” says Musumeci.  “We put him in for merit.  People do like to be acknowledged for doing a good job.”

 

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