‘It’s a life ability’: UNCW, Wilmington Swim Academy wrap free swim classes sequence for teenagers

Bobby Guntoro is the top coach of UNCW’s swimming and diving group. He helped run this system, which supplied 4 free 45-minute swim classes to about 90 children ages 6-12.

WHQR visited the pool the place classes had been happening over the last week of the sequence. Guntoro counted off the totally different teams of scholars.

“You can see proper right here. We arrange 11 totally different lessons: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. So yeah, that is thrilling. You can really feel the vitality coming in,” he said.

Samantha Dugan is a senior on the team and has given back to the community through these free lessons since her freshman year.

“I was with my kids every lesson, and that was just beneficial for the kids because they got to know us. They got more comfortable with us because they’re already uncomfortable in the water, so it is better for them to be comfortable with their instructors,” she said.

It’s quite the operation — they have almost a one-to-one ratio for each lesson. Last Thursday evening’s session had 25 swimmers to about 20 adults.

Ann Freeman, who grew up in coastal Brunswick County, is retired but worked on a $50,660 grant from The Endowment in 2022 to teach kids to swim. She and former UNCW professor Dr. Alyson Fleming acquired the grant based on some swimming pilot program work, and then UNCW staff ran the ‘Learn-to-Swim’ program. One component of that grant was running free lessons for DC Virgo students at the Northside Pool for about two weeks.

Through that grant, she became supportive of Guntoro’s team.

“Wilmington is a coastal community. We’re surrounded by water, with the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean. Everybody needs to know how to swim. Everybody deserves that opportunity to take lessons, but it’s not always available, and it’s definitely not affordable. So, we need to take a serious look at that, and how we can change that, and what we can do about it,” Freeman mentioned.

Learning to swim is about affordability and entry. Guntoro mentioned they’d recurrently cost about $25 per lesson per little one. He mentioned he’s doing what he can to supply this chance — even with out grant funding — however accessibility is one thing the neighborhood must proceed to work on.

“I’m head coach at UNCW, and I get home to see my kids at 4:30 p.m., 4:45 p.m. at the earliest, and I couldn’t take them to the public pool this past summer,” he said. “We’ve got to do a better job; I’m in a position to offer some free swim lessons and some more education to our community, right? And this is a challenge for the City of Wilmington. ‘Hey, you want to get to work? Let’s get to work.’”

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Later in the summertime of 2025, the City of Wilmington and the YMCA of Southeastern NC prolonged these hours in August so working households may entry the pool. However, they didn’t this previous summer time.

In May, Josh Gravette, the manager director of the Nir Family YMCA instructed WHQR that, concerning the extension of hours till 7 p.m., “We found that usage was very limited outside of scheduled events and rentals. Based on that experience, the YMCA and the City collectively decided to continue operating the pools with a 5 p.m. weekday closing time for the 2026 season.”

He added, although, “We always appreciate community feedback […], and needs related to additional swim times or extended hours. As we evaluate pool operations and programming opportunities in the future, community input remains an important part of those conversations.”

Nonetheless, when children present up for these free classes with Guntoro — it’s an opportunity to make main enhancements. He will get within the water to assist, too.

“We worked together with this young boy; he’s about 11 years old, didn’t know how to swim at all in the beginning, and just in the first session, he was able to swim five yards on his own. Today, this is the fourth day; today we took him in a dive well, and he swam all the way for about half of the pool, and then swam back by himself in a 15-foot-deep pool,” he mentioned.

While Dugan is in her last 12 months swimming at UNCW, she’s additionally been an ocean lifeguard in New Jersey. In the ocean, stakes are excessive due to rip currents, which type when there are breaks or holes within the sandbar and the water is dashing out to sea; whereas they received’t pull an individual below, swimmers can get drained and drown. People can swim to the facet to exit the rip, then swim again to shore.

“So, doing this is just so so important, and I urge every parent to get their kids into swim lessons if they can before ever taking them to a beach,” Dugan mentioned.

For Freeman, she received her Master’s in Public Administration at UNCW, and this was her last mission — the significance of getting everybody in the neighborhood into the pool for this life ability.

“In high school, I had a classmate who drowned five days after graduation, and then I started thinking back over my life and other people that I was connected to. I could come up on, you know, 10 people, African American people who drowned, and I’m thinking, like, why is that?” Freeman mentioned.

She present in her analysis that “it didn’t matter how well-educated an African American person was, or their income level, if the parents didn’t swim, 95% of the time the children didn’t swim.”

So Freeman — and Guntoro and his group — are going to proceed engaged on offering entry and affordability to the neighborhood. They’re hoping to broaden subsequent 12 months into greater age group ranges.

Getting adults who by no means discovered to swim can also be a precedence.