At 6 feet 9, Andre Brent has the long, angular body of an NBA all-star. And growing up on the edge of Watts, he admits there was a lot of peer pressure on him to become just that.
Instead, he joined the swim team at Locke High in the 1970s and did well enough to make the City Section championships as a senior before going on to compete in the freestyle and backstroke at Cal State Northridge.
Whenever he returned to the old neighborhood, he says he felt like something of a celebrity -- or maybe just an anomaly.
"A few said, 'Hey, you were a swimmer here. You were the last swimmer we ever had,' " recalled Brent, who today works with young swimmers at a pool in Exposition Park. "We've had some great point guards come out of there, but no swim team anymore."
Locke's not alone. In fact, fewer than half the 104 City Section schools with athletic programs competed in swimming last spring. That's a trend that worries the folks at USA Swimming, who have embarked on an ambitious campaign to bring the sport back to low-income communities. And they hope to use the attention focused on this month's Beijing Olympics to help in that effort.
"That's certainly the plan," said John Cruzat, USA Swimming's national diversity specialist. "At the outset that was not part of the strategic piece. But it does work out that a high-visibility event like the Olympics would help to raise the visibility of this program."
This year, a report conducted by researchers in the department of Health and Sport Sciences at the University of Memphis showed many minority youths must overcome a number of social and economic barriers to get into swimming. Those range from little parental encouragement and a fear of drowning to a lack of pools and the belief that swimming isn't cool.
Nearly 60% of African American children don't know how to swim, the Memphis study showed.
"There's no doubt there's a link historically," said Cruzat, who had to fight for access to a pool in Chicago, yet went on to swim competitively in high school. "There were not a lot of opportunities for, not just African Americans. The same drowning rates we're seeing in the African American community we're also seeing in the Hispanic, Native American and other multicultural communities."
As a result, the study found, the rate of accidental drowning deaths is nearly three times higher for minorities ages 5 to 14 than it is for whites, "which is totally unnecessary," former Olympic rower Anita L. DeFrantz said.
