Raising Water Safety Awareness on NBC's TODAY
Endless™ Pools joined Olympic swimmers and Step Into Swim for National Water Safety Month
Acrobatics, rock concerts, world-record stunts – NBC's TODAY show has hosted a range of wild events on their Plaza. Thanks to Endless Pools®, they were able to host an outdoor swimming lesson in Midtown Manhattan!
Step Into Swim, the nonprofit that's promoted water safety since 2012, spearheaded the event for National Water Safety Month. To raise awareness of this vital issue, they brought Olympic swimmers Rowdy Gaines, Cullen Jones, and Cammile Adams together with local youth swimmers. They gave a fun, informative water safety lesson in our Performance pool.
Scroll down to see footage of the entire TODAY show segment with Savannah Guthrie and Carson Daly.
During the TODAY segment, Carson Daly cited research which found that swimming lessons can reduce the risk of drowning by 90%. Rowdy Gaines replied with his recommendation to promote water safety: "As soon as they can walk, they should be learning how to swim. Water is a magnet for kids."
Olympic gold medalist Cullen Jones nearly drowned at a water park as a child. "Because I didn’t have swim lessons," he recalled, "I really didn’t know what to do." Olympian Cammile Adams added, "It’s a life skill that every single person, child or adult, needs to learn how to do." To promote water safety, she now owns six SafeSplash Swim School locations in the Houston area.
Step Into Swim brought their eager supporters onto TODAY Plaza. Since their founding in 2012, the nonprofit has funded swimming lessons for more than 285,000 kids across the country! Step Into Swim is an initiative of the Pool & Hot Tub Alliance with support from founding partner Every Child A Swimmer.
Cullen and Cammile coached Esme and Benjamin, two young swimmers from AGUA, the Asphalt Green Unified Aquatics Swim Team. The kids demonstrated some basic water safety skills, including blowing bubbles underwater and pushing off the bottom of the pool to grab the side wall. Here, they're demonstrating how to calmly float on your back; as Rowdy noted of their back floating lesson, "a parent can do this; you don’t have to go to an instructor."
It takes a village: Members of Team Endless Pools arranged to have our Performance pool filled with warm water and ready for comfortable water-safety lessons in time for broadcast. And that was just one aspect of the logistics required for this important National Water Safety Month message. Endless Pools is a Silver Sponsor of the National Drowning Prevention Alliance.