When Kelly Yuan chose a college 17 years ago, she was relieved her first choice didn't require students to pass a swimming test.
She didn't remember swimming as a child, when most people master the skill, and a bad experience swallowing pool water as a teen had left her with no desire to learn.
But now, at 34, she decided it was time to catch up. Yuan recently enrolled in an adult swimming class, joining other women between ages 28 and 63 at 7 a.m. every Sunday to learn the ways of the water.
With the erosion of swimming programs in public school physical education classes over the past few decades, some adults are now trying to learn what they may have missed as a child, some swimming experts say. Adult swimming has become popular enough for New York's 92nd Street YM-YWHA to open a second beginners class on Thursday nights in 2004 and double enrollment, said aquatics director Lane Wineski. In New Orleans, some swimming instructors report an increase in adults learning how to swim after Hurricane Katrina.
Swimming instruction programs try to accommodate these special needs, offering adults-only classes and addressing the kinds of fears adults may bring to the water that kids don't. Wineski said she receives up to a half-dozen calls per week from adults asking about swimming lessons. Most people worry they'll be in a class with children.
"They feel they are the only ones who would be afraid to put their face in the water or not go into the deep end," she said. "They're embarrassed they don't feel comfortable because they're not 5 years old learning how to swim."
Yuan's instructor, Manny Tubens, said he takes a different approach with adults. He spends the first 10 minutes of the initial class telling them what to expect and building confidence for the fearful students.
"We walk around the pool in the shallow water. I tell them they can stay near the walls, and I'll hold your hand," he said. "I try to get them in the mood to relax."
He said adults are more serious about swimming. "They want to learn techniques, timing and breathing, whereas the children, they just want to splash around," he said.
While he skips the games -- such as singing "Ring Around the Rosie" to get the kids to dunk their heads under water -- some of the tools are the similar. Adults and children use the same buoyant water noodles. He doesn't give kickboards to children because they can slip off, but uses them with adults.
Kathryn Scott, director of physical education at the University of California at Berkeley, uses at least one game with adults -- called rocks and corks -- to explain the principals of buoyancy and the physics involved with swimming.
"The physiology is important," said Scott, who helped review the Red Cross water safety instruction manual.
Tubens, who has taught swimming for more than 22 years, says he takes on grown-up fears head on. He taught one class at a YWCA in Midtown Manhattan called "Petrified People Don't Sink."
Tubens said he gives his students different options to make them feel comfortable.
"If they can't swim across the pool, 10 or 15 feet, maybe they can walk across and use their arms," he said.
It difficult for adults or even teens to learn to swim because they recognize the real dangers of water, said Allan Cassorla, a clinical psychologist and associate director of counseling and psychological services at Columbia University. He said children are often fearless.
"With adults, there is a greater degree of concern about safety and concerning one's own mortality," he said. "That increases as one gets older."
Many public schools have eliminated swimming programs as part of physical education, as budget cuts reduce physical education classes, said John Leonard, executive director of the American Swimming Coaches Association in Fort Lauderdale.
"It's been steadily occurring since the late '60s and early '70s, and it's gotten worse and worse," he said.
Various news sources
reporting
Phoenix, Arizona, USA goes without a drowning this summer
barriers and preventatives awareness credited
Swimming pool accidents are typically
the biggest killer of children in Phoenix and its suburbs, claiming
more lives than even car crashes. Last year, 22 children drowned, most
of them in the summer, many of them after falling in. That is about
average for the sprawling metropolitan area of 3.6 million people.
But since May 14, not one child has drowned in a pool, according to the Drowning Prevention Coalition of Central Arizona, a group run by parents and rescue workers. No one can seem to remember the last time Phoenix had a zero-drowning summer.
"Knock on wood. It's fantastic," said John Harrington, the group's president.
The achievement is being attributed to a number of preventive measures, many of them promoted by parents like Harrington who lost children to accidental drownings: a 1991 Arizona law that requires fences around pools; a Phoenix Fire Department program that has been providing free fences for the past three years; CPR and pool safety classes now offered in many cities; and public service campaigns that have made "Watch your kids around water" a mantra for parents.
"Good fortune has to be part of it," Phoenix Fire Chief Bob Khan said. "We've had a lot of pool submersions this year where people have gotten to them in time."
In a metropolitan area where the air sizzles from spring often until Halloween, so many youngsters have drowned over the years that police dispatchers developed a special whistle to alert rescue crews over the radio.
Scottsdale Fire Capt. Jim Novotny, who has been pulling kids from backyard pools for 24 years, got to know that trilling sound well, and recalled that in some years, there were multiple drowning calls in an hour.
"It was getting out of control," Novotny said. "You're just throwing your arms up. What can we do to make people more safe around water?"
Harrington, a hospital administrator, helped found the coalition after his 18-month-old son Rex fell into the family pool and died in 1986.
"The baby sitter took my daughter in the house to get something to eat and left Rex out by the pool. By the time she got back out there, he was floating in the pool," said Harrington, 51. "It was the worst thing in my life. It consumed me. During that year, as typical with families, my wife developed a drug and alcohol problem. Then we got divorced."
Harrington said he couldn't stop asking questions about how he could have better protected his family: "Maybe we should have put a fence in. Maybe we should have done a better job picking a baby sitter. Should we have Rex take swim lessons?"
He helped organize consumer product safety officials, firefighters and emergency workers, and the coalition lobbied lawmakers and helped pass a rare state law requiring pool fences for households with young children.
It also helped develop safety products -- including motion sensors that sound an alarm when someone falls into a pool -- and works to educate people about pool safety.
Not surprisingly, warm states lead the nation in drownings: Florida, Arizona, Mississippi averaged more than five deaths per 100,000 people each year from 2000 to 2002, according to Dr. Tim Flood, a state Department of Health Services statistician who works with the coalition.
Without fail, Arizona ranks each year among the top states in per capita drownings among children 4 and under, Flood said.
"I've never seen a summer where we've not had several deaths in pools," Flood said. "If indeed we've gone through the whole summer without a pediatric death, that's very remarkable. Boy, I'd love to have this happen again."