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Tens of millions of people across the country learned how to swim at the YMCA.
It was not always this way, however, and for many years swimming was seen as a
distraction from legitimate physical development.
The first reported YMCA swimming bath was built at the Brooklyn (NY) Central
YMCA in 1885. By the end of the year, it was reported that 17 Ys had pools. Pools
then bore scant resemblance to the pools of today: The Brooklyn Central pool was
14' x 45' and 5' deep. Early pools, in addition to being small, had no filters
or recirculation systems. The water in the pool just got dirtier and dirtier until
the pool was drained and cleaned, which some Ys did on a weekly basis. No wonder
the medical community saw them as a threat to health.
Two developments helped change YMCA staff attitudes towards pools. The first
was the development of mass swim lessons in 1906 by George Corsan at the Detroit YMCA. What Corsan did was to teach swimming
strokes on land, starting with the crawl stroke first, as a confidence builder.
Prior to Corsan's methods, strokes were only taught in the pool and the crawl
was not taught until later. Corsan also came up with the ideas of the learn-to-swim
campaign and using bronze buttons as rewards for swimming proficiency. He gave
a button to boys who swam 50 feet. Corsan's learn-to-swim campaigns resulted in
1909 in the first campaign to teach every boy in the United States and Canada
how to swim.
Perhaps Corsan's land drills for swimming came about as a result of how swimming
had been taught. Early YMCA staff viewed swimming as a distraction from the real
job of physical development, which meant exercise and gymnastics. Boys in San
Francisco, for example, could not use the pool until after they had passed a proficiency
test in gymnastics. In the 1890s, swimming was taught by using a rope and pulley
system.
The second development was the use of filtration systems for keeping the water
clean. Ray L. Rayburn, a founder of what was the Building Bureau (now BFS), came
up with the ideas of building pools with roll-out rims and water recirculation
systems. Recirculation meant that the water could be filtered and impurities removed.
The first roll-out rim was installed in 1909 in the Kansas City, Mo., pool. In
1910, a filtration system was added to the Kansas City pool. No more would pools
be considered health menaces.
The combination of these developments, Corsan's mass teaching techniques and
Rayburn's filtration systems, came together to popularize swimming and swim instruction
at YMCAs. In 1932 there were more than 1 million swimmers a year at YMCAs. In
1956, the national learn-to-swim campaigns became Learn to Swim Month. In 1984,
it was reported that YMCAs collectively were the largest operator of swimming
pools in the world.
It is hard to overestimate the effect the YMCA movement has had on swimming and
aquatics in general. A Springfield College student, George Goss, wrote the first
American book on lifesaving in 1913 as a thesis. It was a YMCA national board
member (then the YMCA International Committee), William Ball, who in the early
1900s encouraged the Red Cross to include lifesaving instruction in its disaster
and wartime services programs. The first mobile swimming pool was invented at
the Eastern Union (NJ) Y in 1961, enabling the Y to take instruction and swimming
programs to people who could not go to the Y. The YMCA Swimming and Lifesaving
Manual, published in 1919, was one of the earliest works on the subject. The Council
for National Cooperation in Aquatics, formed in 1951, was created as a result
of the efforts of the YMCA. A group of 20 national agencies, the Council was organized
to expand cooperation in the field of aquatics.
Even the military used YMCA swim instruction techniques. In World War I, the
Army used mass land drills to teach doughboys. In 1943, Dr. Thomas K. Cureton,
chairman of the YMCA National Aquatic Committee, published Warfare Aquatics, which
was widely used by the armed forces (and YMCAs!) during the conflict and after.
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