Ella Kitchens, Editor-in-Chief
Started by a group of swimmers at Denison, Serve to Swim is a community service group under the Denison Community Service Organization that promotes and raises awareness about water safety.
“We’ve always, as swimmers, had a big passion for water safety,” said Jack Johnson ‘27, president of Serve to Swim. “We all believe everyone should know how to swim. It’s a life-saving skill.
But, we also recognize that there’s a lack of access to swim lessons and swim education, water safety education. And especially in the Licking County area, there’s not a lot of great places to learn and have access to this information. This club is a place for us to work in the community to expand our outreach towards water safety, make it more accessible and available to people who need it.”
While the club technically started last year, Serve to Swim’s executive board has worked to get it up and running this year. For its first official event in November, Serve to Swim hosted a “buddy splash,” where they collaborated with Denison’s Best Buddies chapter to give a group of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities the opportunity to swim in Denison’s Trumbull Aquatics Center.
“Most of [Serve to Swim’s] members are on the swim team, so we’re all really familiar and love being in the water,” said Courtney McKeown, Serve to Swim’s media coordinator. “So we had plenty of people in the water swimming with them, helping them feel comfortable. And then we moved on to doing some relay races, getting them swimming across the pool and they had a lot of fun.”
McKeown said that members of Best Buddies at Denison said that all the buddies loved swimming during the Serve to Swim event.
“I think we’re definitely going to keep this connection with them and try to host an event every semester with them,” said McKeown.
As swimmers, Serve to Swim’s members are passionate about being in the pool. But due to restrictions on swim lessons for children in the Trumbull Aquatics Center, they’ve shifted their focus to teaching water safety outside of the pool, too.
“When we first started, the in-water safety events were the primary goal, so it was good to do that,” said Johnson. “But then something we just started focusing on this year is more water safety seminar type deal, which is what we’re working on with the schools. We were kind of tunnel visioned when we started this whole project on ‘We want to be in the water, we want to be teaching lessons directly’ to now shifting our focus to ‘OK, what can we realistically actually be doing?’ And that’s kind of what’s been taking us towards the water safety seminar route.”
Serve to Swim is working with Granville Elementary School to create a fun water safety presentation for local students.
“We’ve reached out and they’re interested in us coming and presenting water safety to their second grade students,” said Johnson. “We’ll be collaborating with Goldfish Swim School, which is a nationally known organization that reached out to us about our initiative and they wanted to help us get off the ground.”
Serve to Swim was also awarded grant funding from the city of Granville and was recognized by the Granville Community Foundation as a community partner.
“That was one of our kind of big moments in terms of actually getting into the Granville schools as well because that gives us a little more credibility and now we can have money that we can put towards that,” said Johnson.
Serve to Swim posts weekly “water safety Wednesday” tips on their Instagram, including statistics on drowning, general advice for staying safe in the water, facts about cold water shock and swim lessons.
“We try to post a lot of water safety tips on that since that’s something that we’re hoping can reach the right audience,” said McKeown. “A good part of social media is that it’s a public Instagram account. So it might show up on the explore page of someone in the Columbus area who has some connection to water safety and might want to work with us.”
Johnson and McKeown both emphasized the importance of learning to swim as children as a major way to stay safe around the water and avoid scary situations.
“Since I learned from such a young age I’ve always felt pretty comfortable around the water, but I used to teach some lessons in high school so I’ve been around other young children going through those scary moments,” said Johnson. “But I feel like through exposure to swim lessons and water safety education at a young age, you can mitigate the whole kind of scary situations in the first place.”
“The kids who spend more time around the water and have a comfortable, safe relationship with swimming and being around the water at a younger age tend to always enjoy it more,” said McKeown. “And that’s definitely something you can tell. The kids that know the rules of the pool know how to be safe around the water, feel more comfortable, versus those who don’t.”