{"id":17735,"date":"2016-10-17T08:00:35","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T15:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/building-a-swimming-culture-in-bethel\/"},"modified":"2016-10-17T08:00:35","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T15:00:35","slug":"building-a-swimming-culture-in-bethel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/building-a-swimming-culture-in-bethel\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a swimming culture in Bethel"},"content":{"rendered":"

BETHEL<\/strong> \u2014 Bethel sits on a river, but many people here don\u2019t know how to swim. People drown in the Kuskokwim every year, and for decades people thought the solution was to build a pool and teach people to swim. Well, two years ago the city got a pool. But how do you build a swim culture where one has never existed? That\u2019s a question Bethel\u2019s first swim team is trying to answer, reported KYUK-AM.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are going to start with our freestyle set and move into butterfly,\u201d said Coach Erika Andrews during practice. \u201cTwo, one, go!\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also Bethel\u2019s first swim coach. Ever.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was interesting the first day,\u201d Andrews said. \u201cI had about 15 or 16 that came, some that were pretty good at swimming, some that had never swam in their lives before.<\/p>\n

Now, more than a month into the season, there\u2019re a dozen swimmers in grades seven through 12. Most of the teenagers had never swum before, at least not competitively. They could move from one end of the pool to the other, but not much farther, and not with proper strokes.<\/p>\n

Most grew up in Bethel, where there\u2019d never been a place to swim. Anyone who had learned didn\u2019t do it here.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery summer we go down to Oregon, so I started taking swim lessons down there,\u201d said 10th grader and basketball player Gareth Rice.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents are from Utah, and so when we visit my grandparents, I learned how to swim there,\u201d said seventh grader Jordan Wheeler.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandma was a lifeguard when she lived in Florida, when she lived there and taught swim lessons,\u201d said 10th grader Skylar Sargent. \u201cSo when we went to visit her, she helped teach all us kids that.\u201d<\/p>\n

But most of the kids weren\u2019t learning laps or strokes, at least not the kind Andrews is teaching.<\/p>\n

Andrews said a consistent kick and high elbows are two of the most important concepts about swimming that she\u2019s trying to teach.<\/p>\n

\u201cNever stop moving your arms, and never stop moving your feet, and you won\u2019t stop moving,\u201d Andrews said.<\/p>\n

Another challenge Andrews faces is building credibility for swimming: teaching people that, yes, swimming is a sport, not just conditioning for another sport.<\/p>\n

Ryan Smith is a 10th grader.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first I was just trying to get in shape for wrestling,\u201d Smith said. \u201cBut then it just stuck on me. It\u2019s a fun sport, so got to stick with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now Smith said swimming is right up there with wrestling. And he\u2019s found some unexpected benefits along the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve found that I\u2019m excelling in all my classes more normally than I would have, because I\u2019m waking up early in the morning and exercising,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n

The team gets up early. Most practices start at 6 a.m.; school starts at 8:15 a.m.<\/p>\n

Rice said the waking up part is hard, but the actual swimming part is even harder. He\u2019s had no trouble being convinced that swimming is its own sport.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been limits that I wasn\u2019t able to reach through any other sports or activities that I found in swimming, that I was able to push beyond that I never knew I could ever do before,\u201d Rice said. \u201cSwimming, it just works a lot more. It\u2019s working everything simultaneously, and you have to be in sync, which you do in basketball, but I\u2019d say in swimming a bit more. And it\u2019s more of a constant, a constant work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike many of the swimmers, Sargent isn\u2019t training for another sport. In fact, she said the whole sports thing is new to her.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am a nerd on the swim team,\u201d Sargent said. \u201cI am a very fit nerd. That is what I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sargent said in fourth grade she gave a speech to City Council, asking them to build a pool. Now it\u2019s here, but she said people are still becoming aware of it. She calls the pool a phantom presence.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople know it\u2019s here. They can sense it, but they don\u2019t really go to it. Or it\u2019s not a real thing,\u201d Sargent said. \u201cJust get more people interested.\u201d<\/p>\n

But has the pool made people safer on the river? Most of the swimmers, like Wheeler, say yes.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven with life vest on, you still need to know how to keep yourself up,\u201d Wheeler said. \u201cSo I feel safer for me and safer for everyone else because more people know how to swim now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team is expected to compete at least once this year, probably against an Anchorage team. Coach Andrews called this year a building season, for the team and the community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BETHEL \u2014 Bethel sits on a river, but many people here don\u2019t know how to swim. People drown in the Kuskokwim every year, and for decades people thought the solution was to build a pool and teach people to swim. Well, two years ago the city got a pool. But how do you build a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":17736,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-17735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17735"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=17735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}