SECTION:Local

PUBDATE:July 3, 2006

HEADLINE:Sink or swim

BYLINE:By Faith Ford

CONTACT:News Herald Writer 522-5114 / fford@pcnh.com

TEXT:Malik Whitley adjusted his mirrored goggles and plunged underwater in pursuit of a blue plastic fish. He concentrated as he surged ahead, testing out his swimming skills after a month of lessons. With the openings of two area swimming pools in the last year, Whitley, 8, is one of a handful of local black children diving into swimming this summer. It is a pastime with a broad racial divide that may date back as far as the pre-Civil War era. “I think it has its roots in the history as an oppressed race,” said John Cruzat, a diversity specialist for USA Swimming. “It goes back into the antebellum South where depriving African-Americans of that skill was a way of controlling their ability to escape repression.”

In a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey published in 2003, 62 percent of black respondents said they had limited swimming skills compared to 32 percent of white respondents.

CDC data shows that black children and teens between 5 and 19 are 2.3 times more likely to drown than their white peers. Drowning is the second leading cause of accidental death among children, according to the CDC.

“I think we’ve made some steps. We’ve made some huge steps,” Cruzat said. “But generally speaking, the drowning statistics indicate that we still have a long way to go in terms of ensuring that every child learns to swim.”

Today, access and affordability rank among the biggest factors keeping blacks from swimming, he said.

1991 drownings

The drownings of five local black children in 1991 caught the attention of the Boy’s and Girl’s Clubs of Bay County. The children, between 3 and 15, were swept out by the current near the DuPont Bridge in June of that year.

The tragedy spurred talks of the need for a public swimming pool, said Paul Mosca, the club’s executive director.

“We realized that not only blacks, but right across the board — both whites and blacks in terms of lower income groups — just really didn’t have access to swimming,” Mosca said. “We realized that there was an extreme need. Here we are sitting on the Gulf of Mexico where kids should be able to learn to interact with the water.”

More than a decade after the drownings, the Boy’s and Girl’s Clubs Aquatic Center opened off 19th Street in Panama City this year. The pool already is making a difference for kids like Whitley.

Aquatics director Beth Smith said some of the students didn’t even know what to do in the pool at the start of summer vacation. Only about half of the 6- and 7-year-olds could swim the width of the pool.

“Now they are actually getting better,” Smith said. “It’s nothing pretty, but (most) can get across.”

About 60 percent of the 800 kids enrolled with the Boy’s and Girl’s Clubs this summer are on scholarship, and many parents cannot afford lessons, Mosca said. Still, all of the children are given basic instruction and a chance to become accustomed to the water during free swim time.

Swimming lessons also are open to nonmembers, and the pool is open to the general public on weekends and for limited weekday hours.

“We’ve been able so far to give a lot of lower-income families the opportunity to swim at a low cost,” Mosca said.

Fear of water

Malik’s mother, Reashella Dudley, never learned to swim. She concedes a fear of the water.

For black children, fear of swimming is passed down from their parents, Smith said.

“I think the majority of the black community is scared of the water,” she said. “The parents are scared of the water so their kids are scared of the water.”

But at the same time, she said, she has had parents tell her they want their children to learn because they never had the opportunity.

Dudley said she is proud of her son — even if she was nervous at first.

“My dad has a fishing pond,” she said. “This will make me feel more comfortable with him being around the water.”

Growing up in Chipley, Panama City Commissioner Jonathan Wilson, who is black, had two friends drown in local ponds. He witnessed one of the drownings.

“My mother told me to stay out of the water until I learned how to swim, so I guess I never did learn how,” he said. At 70, Wilson said he still regrets never learning.

He suggests the disparity in swimming is tied to segregation.

“When I was a young man coming up, we couldn’t go to the beach,” Wilson said. “The main beach was off limits to black people.”

Today, Wilson said black children do not seem all that interested in outdoor recreation.

“I guess it’s a multiplicity of things,” Wilson said of the reasons why more blacks are not swimming. “There’s always a lot of reasons why things happen.”

Paul Finchbaugh is director of the Frank Brown Park Aquatic Center at Panama City Beach. He was a springboard diver in college and has coached both diving and swimming at the collegiate level.

“I just think there’s not that much emphasis put on swimming” for blacks, he said.

Finchbaugh said there are no blacks enrolled in lessons now at the Frank Brown Park pool, but he noted that there are few blacks living in the beaches area. Less than 1 percent of the city’s population is black, according to the Web site www.citydata.com.

Water everywhere

In a coastal area like Bay County, Finchbaugh said, the importance of learning to swim cannot be measured. In the gulf, “if you don’t know how to swim, you’re going to find yourself in trouble pretty quickly,” he said.

But many nonswimmers dip in anyway.

Wilson said he goes in the water but stays close to the shore and is conscious of currents. Most people who get in trouble, he said, are out-oftowners unaccustomed to the gulf.

On the rare occasion she gets in, Dudley said she takes a float and stays close to the water’s edge.

Panama City Swim Team coach Jonathan Kaplan said he is starting to notice greater racial diversity at swimming. At a recent swim meet in Auburn, Ala., Kaplan said he was pleased to see a team that was almost all black.

“They were kicking butt, doing great,” said Kaplan, who swam competitively at Florida State University. “It’s just a matter of making more African-Americans aware of it.”

Kaplan said there are about five of six blacks on his 90- to 95-member team.

“The percentage isn’t nearly as high as it should be, but I’d say we’re probably about average” compared to other teams, he said.

Next Tiger Woods?

What Tiger Woods did for golf or the Williams sisters did for tennis is yet to happen for swimming.

“That would be a dream come true,” Cruzat said. “Can you imagine what an impact that would have?

“Children would just flock to pools and bodies of water to emulate someone that they could really hold in high esteem.”

But for now, swimming just is not as cool for blacks as some other sports, Kaplan said, and it’s not as easy to participate.

“They don’t even have to own a basketball to go down to the neighborhood court,” he said.