HBCU Celebration Swim Meet honors Black history in aquatics with eyes on the future

Football isn’t the only sport that will be celebrated in Atlanta this weekend. The long but often interrupted legacy of swimming and other water sports at historically Black colleges and universities will be on display Friday and Saturday at Morehouse College during Diversity in Aquatics’ HBCU Celebration Swim Meet and Water Safety Festival.

However, the second annual event also will focus on the future of swimming, including the slow renaissance of aquatics programs at HBCUs and potential careers and lifestyles available.

That is why the event, which is being held in partnership with the Cricket Celebration Bowl, is more than just a competition for past and present swimmers in all age groups and categories, said Miriam Lynch, executive director of Diversity in Aquatics, an organization dedicated to promoting and supporting aquatic activities, education and safety in historically underrepresented communities.

Lynch, a former swimmer at Howard University who is now a volunteer coach for Howard’s renowned swimming and diving program, cites multiple advantages that come from knowing how to swim and be safe in the water, from participating in sports such as rowing and water polo to pursuing careers such as marine biology and joining the Coast Guard.

“It’s the blue economy,” Lynch said. 

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That isn’t just a figure of speech. Civil rights legend Andrew Young swam competitively at Howard in the 1950s. Samuel L. Jackson did the same at Morehouse in the 1970s. Howard and other HBCUs even required passing a swimming class for graduation up until the coronavirus pandemic a few years ago.

“They knew swimming was networking,” Lynch said. “You know what they say, ‘You need to learn how to golf because most of your business is on the golf course.’ The same thing with swimming – you need to learn how to swim because that’s also where business is conducted, during those summer times at the pool. Water safety was a part of the culture, a part of the lifestyle.” 

Swimming was part of academic and cultural life at HBCUs for decades. According to Nicholas Askew, Howard’s director of swimming and diving and tennis, more than 20 institutions had swimming and diving teams as recently as the 1980s, including Morehouse, which had a dominant team in the 1970s under coach James Haines and the two programs playing in the Celebration Bowl, Howard and Florida A&M University.

Masters swimmer Doug Carrington swam competitively at Florida A&M in the 2000s and later served as an assistant coach and head coach for the university. Carrington had come to the Florida HBCU thinking strictly of his engineering studies, having drifted away from a youth swimming career in Albany, New York. His coach at FAMU, Jorge Olaves, had Carrington compete in the 200-meter backstroke in the conference championship meet.

“I found on the bus ride home that, OK, I got the school record in the backstroke,” Carrington recalled. “And it was at that moment that I said, OK, I gotta take this seriously. I gotta really get into this. How can I make the record faster? How can I be better?”

Carrington brought that mindset to his continued participation in swimming. When Lynch, who swam at Howard at the same time Carrington was at Florida A&M, organized the HBCU Celebration Swim Meet, he suggested bringing older swimmers into the mix, knowing how much fellowship there would be in the HBCU swimming community.

“It’s like family,” he said. “I’ve been inundated with a lot of people that used to swim with me, saying, ‘Yeah, come to Atlanta and go to the meet.’ That’s what you want, people that you know. You want people to be enthusiastic about maybe coming and getting back together, something that you know doesn’t happen very often.”

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Diversity in Aquatics, which was founded in 2010, now has about 2,000 members, including board members and U.S. Olympic medal-winning swimmers Cullen Jones and Maritza Correia McClendon. One of the driving forces for Diversity in Aquatics to organize the swim meet and water safety festival was that Howard is currently the only HBCU with a swimming program.

That is gradually changing. Club programs are either starting or restarting at Delaware State University, Grambling State University, Morehouse, North Carolina Central University and Spelman College. Funding campaigns are underway to build or refurbish pool facilities at several universities, including Morehouse, which still needs major upgrades even as it hosts the HBCU Celebration Swim Meet for a second straight year. USA Swimming and U.S. Masters Swimming have contributed significant funding to this weekend’s events and HBCU programs overall.

Gathering those people in the context of reviving dormant or discarded programs is an even greater incentive, Carrington said. 

“They’re like, a step away. You have something to model on, to say, ‘Hey, this is how we could do it,’ ” he said. “So, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s the new dialogue, what’s the new ideas out there that can keep the juices flowing, that, yeah, maybe some of these schools do bring the kids back so that it’s not just Howard.”

The Black aquatics community is welcoming the resurgence. Harold Head II, who heads Morehouse’s club program, previously ran aquatics programs at YMCAs in Atlanta and surrounding counties. He also is the son of Harold Head, who headed the aquatics program for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department and taught physical education at Morehouse in the 1960s.

As a Morehouse student, the younger Head followed his father’s commitment to water sports, getting his first experience in administration, working as a part-time lifeguard and earning certifications before graduating.

When he returned to Morehouse five years ago, he said, the facilities largely remained the same. 

“It’s still the same pool as when I was there, back in the ’90s. Very little has changed from when my father was there back in the ’60s,” he said.

The challenge of getting money to stay current, even at a prestigious private institution like Morehouse, affects athletic programs of all sizes, leaving Head to scramble to give students interested in the program something to work with.

“We’re now trying to get some exposure,” he said, “to let people know what we’re doing at the facility, trying to start the program back up and see if we can get inside the curriculum a recreation and aquatics track, so a person can come in as a freshman and do the exact same thing that I did.”

The head start he had, because of a parent immersed in water sports, doesn’t have to be the only path for Black people of any age to get immersed themselves, Head said. 

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Others committed to swimming, water safety and education agree. Teshia Lincoln, a kinesiology professor at Grambling State who is helping facilitate the club program at her alma mater, was a dance student there. She had grown up swimming with her siblings in ponds, lakes and rivers nearby in Louisiana.

“It wasn’t like we went to the YMCA to learn how to swim,” she said, laughing. 

Her interest in engaging in water sports and education intensified when she took up water aerobics to rehab from a dance injury.

Grambling’s Tiger S.H.A.R.K.S. – the acronym stands for swimming, health and wellness, aquatics fitness, recreation and rehabilitation, kinesiology and safety awareness – is designed to serve the local community as well as the university, Lincoln said. The program’s challenges are familiar to other HBCUs: resources, including the fact that Grambling did not have a working pool on campus for nearly three decades, and the continued reluctance of Black people to get in the pool – “the fear factor,” Lincoln said.

Her experience tells her the fear is largely cultural, she said. 

“We have a lot of international students who come, and they swim because they’re born into it,” Lincoln said. “It’s a necessity for them, whereas truly in some neighborhoods or standpoints within our lives it’s only recreational.”

The practical benefits of knowing how to swim are critical to Diversity in Aquatics’ cause and that of the HBCU Celebration Swim Meet. Organizers and participants can cite the disproportionate statistics on drowning by Black people compared with whites and other demographic groups.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drowning death rates for Black people are 1.5 times higher than for whites, and among Black children ages 10-14, the rate is 3.6 times higher – and a terrifying 7.6 times higher for those children when in pools.

Lincoln said water accidents such as the 2010 drowning of six teenagers in Shreveport, Louisiana, have driven people to participate in Grambling’s program and others. 

Herman Kelly, then the pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and an African American studies adjunct instructor at Louisiana State University, was one of those deeply affected by those drownings. Kelly was part of the Morehouse swimming powerhouse in the 1970s and part of his master’s education at Springfield College in Massachusetts was in aquatics, but as his teaching and ministry grew, he spent less time in the pool. The Shreveport tragedy moved him to action, he recalled.

“I said, ‘Wow, that bothers me, God. Somebody ought to do something,’ ” Kelly said. “And God spoke back to me, ‘You know how to swim. Why don’t you do something?’ ”

Kelly, an avid swimmer since growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, started a swimming program for youth at his church and plans to do the same at his new parish, Grant Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Amite, Louisiana. He also has become a masters swimming champion, winning several national competitions since returning to swimming seriously nearly a decade ago.

Even with his epiphany about teaching swimming being rooted in tragedy, Kelly fully embraces the possibilities of a love of the water. A scheduling conflict will keep him from attending the HBCU Celebration Swim Meet at his alma mater, but he said he is already committed to attending in 2024.

The wealth of positive stories, histories and legacies are such that Lynch is adamant about the negatives not defining Black people’s relationship to the water.

“What we start off with is, we don’t talk about it in a deficit mindset,” she said. “For us, we are changing the narrative of all aquatics and how it is approached in communities, because for so long the narrative has been, ‘Learn to swim so you don’t drown,’ right? It’s so aggressive.

“The strategic plan is, ‘This is where we can be in this space.’ Our part in that was to talk about the possibilities when you learn to swim.”