What do Californians have against water parks?

When SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment decided to switch one of its water parks to a Sesame Place theme, its Aquatica park outside San Diego was the obvious choice. Sure, Southern California and Northern Baja California provides a huge market of families with young children, which is essential for a Sesame Street-themed attraction. But Aquatica wasn’t exactly packing in the crowds under its old design. The Chula Vista park was by far the least-attended of the company’s water parks.

SeaWorld Parks’ four other water parks ranked within the top eight spots in the country in the most recent attendance report by the Themed Entertainment Association and AECOM. Why mess with success? Aquatica San Diego did not rank in the top 20. In fact, no water parks in California cracked the list.

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That’s surprising, as California typically places well in any accounting of popular tourist destinations. California theme parks claim six of the top 20 spots in the TEA/AECOM report for that category, for example. California has plenty of water parks, but apparently not even the state’s nearly 40 million residents were enough to push one into the national top 20.

The last California water park to make the list was Knott’s Soak City in Buena Park, which placed 19th in 2018 and 2017. San Dimas’ Raging Waters came in 20th in 2016. Even so, those parks recorded attendance about one-fourth of the national leaders. Why?

Sure, Californians can just go to the beach instead. Yet Florida offers hundreds of miles more ocean coastline than California, and Florida dominates the water park attendance list with five of the top seven parks in the nation, despite being the nation’s third-most populated state. The second-most-populated state, Texas, has six of the top 16 most-visited water parks in the country.

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The water park industry’s roots lie in the Golden State. The man the World Waterpark Association called “the father of the waterpark” was a Californian. A decade after co-founding SeaWorld San Diego, George Millay developed Wet ‘n Wild, which is considered the original modern water park. But Millay built that park in Orlando, not California.

Maybe he knew something? When making the switch to Sesame Place, SeaWorld Parks added nearly a dozen non-water attractions, including kiddie rides, shows, an interactive Sesame Street neighborhood and a parade. It made what was exclusively a water park into more of a theme park.

Perhaps that is what Californians demand. The numbers suggest that water slides and wave pools just aren’t enough to get consumers’ attention in the Golden State.