When Jeffrey Phillips looks around the pool deck at the men's ACC swimming championship, he likely won't see many faces like his.
Phillips, a freestyle specialist and captain of Georgia Tech's swim team, is one of a handful of African-Americans, including teammate Nigel Plummer, who will compete at the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center.
"I definitely think about it," Phillips said. "But it's something I've gotten used to."
It's been an interesting journey for the man who is still the only person in his seven-person family that can swim. He's experienced the fear that some have toward those who are different. He's heard bizarre reasons why African-Americans either don't swim or aren't any good at swimming, but he knows one thing: He loves his sport and hopes to one day help others enjoy it as much as he has.
Phillips was 11 when he began swimming in Oxford, Miss. Nobody in his family swam. They loved going to the lake and playing in the water, but they stayed in the shallow depths. Phillips took lessons and loved it. He talked his mom into letting him join a team so he could swim every day.
"I didn't know that it would be every day for the next 10, 11 years," he said.
The family lived near the campus of Ole Miss, so Phillips had access to competitive pools on campus, as well as city pools.
Phillips and Georgia Tech swim coach Courtney Shealy Hart said more African-Americans don't participate in the sport or know how to swim because of a lack of access. A study commissioned by USA Swimming found that 60 percent of African-American children don't know how to swim, almost twice as many as white children.
During a club meet when he was 13, Phillips said some people in the sport weren't used to seeing a "black guy doing well." While looking at meet results, the mother of a competitor said something inappropriate that Phillips and his mother heard.
"Racism is a disease of the mind," Phillips said. "We took it and offered a prayer for them. But after that one moment I think I earned my respect in the sport."
He kept swimming. At 6-feet-5 1/2, he also played basketball in high school at Lafayette. He eventually dedicated himself to the water more than the court. He became so good that Lafayette started a team, which was disbanded shortly after he left.
Shealy Hart, a two-time Olympic winner, began swimming when she was 5. She didn't consistently swim with an African-American teammate until going to college at Georgia.
Even while Phillips walks around Tech's cosmopolitan campus, wearing warm-ups that plainly state "Georgia Tech Swimming and Diving," students have a hard time putting a black person and swimming together. Phillips gets asked if he plays basketball or football.
Part of it is a myth in place for hundreds of years: Black people can't swim because they have too much muscle mass, and because muscle is heavier than fat, it causes them to sink. Phillips and Shealy Hart laugh at that. A New York Times story in 2006 theorized that the idea that African-Americans can't swim goes back to slavery. Owners wouldn't teach their slaves how to swim for fear they would escape. Generations were never introduced to swimming. Segregation denied African-Americans access.
"It's a sport, anybody can be good at any sport," Phillips said. "Color should have nothing to do with it."
USA Swimming has pushed a campaign to get more African-Americans involved in swimming. Phillips and Shealy Hart said they see more kids competing in club meets in Atlanta and around the country than in the past.
Phillips, an industrial engineering major, already has accepted a job with Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati for later this year. He hopes to align with a foundation that will teach more African-Americans how to swim, and improve their lives.
"Swimming played a significant role in shaping the person I am now," Phillips said. "It teaches me about discipline, respect. It teaches you to have faith in what you are doing."
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