Made up of predominantly Black swimmers under the age of 14, the Bayview Safety Swim and Splash program offers free swimming lessons to kids with a Bayview zip code. It began in 2022, after parents in the community expressed interest in having their children learn how to swim through the development of the India Basin Waterfront Park.
The event, which overlapped with a resource fair for families, featured dozens of children riding on rowboats to celebrate their accomplishments. Tamara Barak Aparton, spokesperson for the Recreation and Parks Department, said that around 100 kids are in each program cohort and, since the program’s creation, more than 1,000 have participated overall.
Sabrina Hall’s son, Brandon, was one of the young swimmers. She said part of what drew her to the program was ensuring he didn’t continue the negative associations with water.
“There’s a lot of racial disparities in sports and a lot of African Americans are scared of the water, so I said I didn’t want that stigma on my son because I did have it as well,” Hall said. “At first, I didn’t want him to be in the program, but I said go ahead and push him because this is a new generation.”
Hall said that Brandon hadn’t been exposed to the water before enrolling in the program, in part because of her personal negative associations with swimming.
“He’s not going to be a part of that stigma, that count or that statistic,” Hall added.
Dee Hillman, who has three daughters, echoed that experience. Before the program, Hillman said she had trauma associated with the water and her daughters, all of whom are enrolled in Safety Swim and Splash, had minimal exposure to the water.
“For me, it was, ‘I want my kids to have better swim skills than I do,’” Hillman said. “And they have completely surpassed my comfortability in the water.”
Hillman’s daughter Sarah expressed a simpler take on the program: It’s fun.
“We do dolphin kicks, elementary backstroke and a lot of other things,” she said.
Bayview resident and father Rhett Burdon said he heard about the event through an email, and that he’s considering enrolling his daughter in the swimming program.
“Programs like this are extremely important, especially as you’re focusing on racial and ethnic disparities. It is fairly stark that Black communities in particular don’t have the same level of exposure to the sort of outdoor activities so they can gain the skills necessary not just for survival but to have fun,” Burdon said.
But there’s a waitlist, Vicky Carrillo, YMCA director of equity and aquatics, said.
“It’s limited and it’s popular,” Carrillo said.
Carrillo said they want to expand the program to offer more services, but that comes with challenges of its own. San Francisco doesn’t have a lot of pools and, because of the racial disparities in swimming, older generations with the skills needed to teach kids are limited, Carrillo added.
Parents of Black children also have less experience in the water than white parents. Seventy eight percent of Black parents lack swimming skills compared to 67% of white parents, data from the USA Swimming Foundation shows.
The YMCA is trying to help with that.
Carrillo said the YMCA is using a workforce program to train older kids in the neighborhood to swim and then have them train younger kids in turn.
“We’re really building the water safety from the community down through the generations,” Carrillo said.
