It’s June in Atlanta and that means swim team. For the second year, the Grant Park Jaguar Sharks in southeast Atlanta are joining the bedlam, donning goggles and scribbling “Eat My Bubbles” on their flesh, all in the name of seeing who can get across the pool fastest. The new swim team boasts only 30 swimmers but what it lacks in bodies it makes up for in aspiration — and coaching. Sabir Muhammad was the first black swimmer to break an American record and became a multiple NCAA champion at Stanford University. Plus, Muhammad, knows something about teaching city kids to swim. He was one, having learned his strokes at a rec program at Atlanta’s Pittman Park pool before joining the City of Atlanta Dolphins. A manager at an Internet company by day, Muhammad founded the Atlanta Swim School, which offers scholarships to needy kids.
Q: How difficult is it to get a swim team off the ground?
A: Swim teams have high organizational needs. They are hours and hours of work. You can’t have a swim team without very dedicated parents who do everything from marking up their children for races, lining them up, timing the races, compiling the events. A swim team is not for the feint of heart.
Q: Why would you take one on?
A: At this point, swimming is in my DNA. My two boys are swimmers. My mother is involved in the swim program. All of my siblings are swim instructors. And I just love this sport. For three months out of the year, I get to go crazy and teach a bunch of kids to swim. It brings me more joy than anything else I do.
Q: Right now, the Jaguar Sharks is a mostly white team. Given the makeup of Grant Park, are you disappointed you don’t have more African-American kids?
A: Not necessarily, in fact we are one of the most diverse team in Atlanta. We can only grow as fast we can develop our own talents. I have minority swimmers at every level of our learn-to-swim program and I am confident we will be more diverse in the future.
Q: African-American kids are three times more likely to drown than white kids. Why don’t more black kids learn to swim?
A: There has been a great deal of research on this. It basically boils down to parents. Swimming is something that one generation teaches the next. Unfortunately, in the minority community, we had multiple generations that didn’t learn to swim.
Q: Why did you learn to swim?
A: When I was a really young kid, I was at a family reunion and decided I could swim and ran into a river. My dad had to pull me out — he was the only one there who knew how to swim. Everyone thought it would be a good idea if I learned.
Q: What does swimming give a kid?
A: It is absolutely a life skill. And you take a kid who comes from a background where they don’t have a lot of control over their lives, they get an extreme sense of confidence learning to swim across the pool.
Q: Do your swimming accomplishments give you credibility with the kids?
A: That helps but I don’t think it is required. I grew up on a swim team where none of the parents or the coaches knew anything about swimming. They told us we would be great and we believed them.
Q: Kids get so obsessed about where they place in their heats. How do you handle that?
A: I do my best to focus not on the outcome of the race, but how they did during the race. It takes a certain amount of heart to even compete. I acknowledge everyone who does as being great.
Q: Where do you expect the Grant Park swim team to be in five years?
A: Hopefully, we will be a bigger program. My ultimate goal is to have a quality program that is diverse with very engaged parents. That is more important than numbers.
Sunday Conversation is edited for length and clarity. Writer Ann Hardie can be reached by email at ann.hardie@ymail.com.
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