Wednesday, Jun. 16, 2010

Swim group blazes trail for minorities

Kathy Cooper vividly remembers the segregated swimming pools of the 1970s, when she was growing up in rural Eastern North Carolina. She swam in the "black" pool.

But Cooper and her friends didn't know the difference between white pools and black pools. They just loved to swim.

Today, Cooper is 50. The North Raleigh resident doesn't blame those long-ago days of segregation for the dire drowning statistics for minorities. And she doesn't blame segregation for the lack of diversity in modern competitive swimming.

The problem is primarily cost.

"Swimming is a very expensive sport to participate in year-round," Cooper said.

She would know. Her daughter, Candace Cooper, swam for the YMCA of the Triangle and was a standout at Ravenscroft School before graduating in 2008 and earning a partial scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she swims for the Tar Heels.

"It cost us $5,000 a year when my daughter was swimming year-round," Cooper said.

A decade ago, Cooper and a small group of parents whose kids excelled on their year-round teams created an informal travel group for minority swimmers. They called it the N.C. Aquablazers.

"We wanted to expose our kids to other swim meets at the national level," Cooper said. "We also wanted to make other minority children aware of competitive swimming as a sport to pursue."

The Aquablazers first swam together as a North Carolina team in an exhibition relay at the 2000 Chris Silva Meet in Atlanta, now called the Black History Meet. A year later, the team incorporated as a nonprofit under federal law and received its state nonprofit status in 2002.

By 2003, the Aquablazers had become an official AAU team and had started its own national meet, The Black Heritage Championship. Twenty teams competed over Memorial Day Weekend in Charlotte that first year.

"We quickly realized we couldn't compete with NASCAR," Cooper said. "Memorial Day is a big day in racing in Charlotte, and hotel room rates triple that weekend."

They moved the championship to the YMCA in Goldsboro but over time outgrew hotel space in that small town. A plan to hold it in Orlando sank after one year because of high travel costs.

Move to Triangle

They brought the meet to the Triangle in 2009.

And last Memorial Day, 738 swimmers from 42 teams in eight states descended on the Triangle Aquatic Center in Cary for the eighth annual Black Heritage Championship.

World-record holder and 2008 Olympic Gold Medalist Cullen Jones and 2004 Olympic Silver Medalist Maritza Correia were there. Over the years, these champions have become staples of the event, where they swim exhibition laps with the kids, sign autographs and conduct clinics.

For Cooper, a deputy state attorney general by day and a volunteer swim team organizer at night and on weekends, this is a labor of love. After all, she has no children of her own participating now. She admits that some people think she's out of her mind for devoting so much time to it.

"I love the sport of swimming, and to see the kids grow and improve is wonderful."

The USA Swimming Foundation reports that six in 10 African-American and Latino children are unable to swim, nearly twice as many as their white counterparts. In ethnically diverse communities, the youth drowning rate is more than double the national average.

"We're trying to build something here with the Aquablazers," Cooper said. "We look at it as our community service."

Next on the organizers' agenda is the creation of a new foundation that will raise money to fund swimming lessons for kids who can't afford them.

The Garner Road YMCA and the Triangle Aquatic Center in Cary offer free or reduced-cost lessons for children from low-income households. Cooper believes the Aquablazers can do more to help. Already, the organizers are devoting some proceeds from the Black Heritage Championship to providing free swimming lessons for kids. The new foundation will create more opportunities for minority kids and will serve to promote diversity in aquatics.

"I'm not doing this for money. I love the sport of swimming, and I love kids," Cooper said. "When we first started this, if you had told us we'd go this far, we might not have believed you."

Going the distance, one lap at a time, has made a believer out of her.