YMCA, Boys & Girls Clubs team up for free swimming safety program

Splashing in the water can have a very positive impact on someone’s life from their childhood to their senior years.

The Bill & Lillie Heinrich YMCA, 4141 Meadows Lane, has partnered this summer with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Nevada to create a no-cost Safety Around Water swimming safety program, available for children who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to take swimming lessons.

Chuck Searle, development director for the YMCA of Southern Nevada, is in charge of fundraising for the program, providing kids from low-income families with water safety and swimming skills.

The ultimate goal is for the children to feel completely comfortable in a water setting, he said, and to be able to float on their back and stomach. They should also be able to help someone else who is in danger of drowning toward the end of the eight 45-minute lessons.

The program is expected to reach 250 kids from ages 6 to 11.

According to the USA Swimming Foundation, more than one in five drowning victims are children younger than 14, and if a parent does not know how to swim, their children only have a 13 percent chance of learning to swim.

Juli Branch, 32, aquatics coordinator at the Heinrich YMCA, has been swimming since she was 3 and believes “in the lifelong effects of what water can do therapy-wise, mentally and physically.”

She wants to teach all the kids that go through the program self-confidence in and around the water. Branch hopes her students can share what they have learned throughout the program with their families and friends.

She said she has seen a 100 percent success rate in the program and so far every child she has taught — no matter how scared at first — has overcome their fear of the water and is now able to swim from one edge of the pool to the other.

Within the first 10 minutes of the lesson, she gets in the water and teaches the lesson of the day. After that, the kids stay with the lifeguard to practice and refine what they have learned, at the end summarizing what they have been taught.

Branch also trains lifeguards on how to teach swimming lessons with a hands-on approach.

Arthur Henderson, 10, one of the kids finishing the program, said, “It’s fun. They’ve taught us what to do in an emergency and backstrokes.”

“One drowning is way too many,” said Searle, who added that by seeing how successful the program has been as a pilot, there is interest in expanding it to two more pools for nextsummer.

There are slots open. Contact the Heinrich YMCA at 702-877-7222 or register in person.

For more information, visit lasvegasymca.org.