Featured in USA Swimming’s Splash Magazine
Over the last 50 years, Detroit has become an infamous city. The collapse of the automobile industry led to high unemployment rates, abandoned homes, urban decay, and over time, a large influx in crime. But hope and inspiration still lives here, and it can be found behind the walls of the Boll Family YMCA, where Nikole Constas, the Y team, and the Vanderkaay family are taking a stand for swimming education.
Their initiative, called Detroit Swims, was established in 2010, after USA Swimming released findings from a study that showed nearly 70 percent of African American children and Latino children have little to no swimming ability, compared to 40 percent of Caucasians. Even more disturbing was the area of the study that revealed that African-American and Latino children are three times more likely to drown than other children.
After the study came out, Constas brought her lifeguarding team together to discuss the results and figure out a way to reach and teach more at-risk children in Detroit. They were already teaching a few thousand kids to swim each year through their regular, membership-based swim lesson program, but Constas wanted to make a bigger impact.
“Most of the 120,000 kids in our city had little to no access to swim lessons, and kids drown every year because of this,” Constas says. “So we decided to tackle this problem with a new approach.”