The Safe Swim Foundation is founded upon my many years of experience with swimming in many forms. I have been a Survival Swim Instructor for over 20 years. My association with near drownings started at a young age. I remember being on vacation, and my sister and I were swimming at a hotel pool. My parents did the normal thing parents do, and that is to place children in the pool with floatation devices. The problem with all floatation devices is that it gives not only the child, but the parents a false sense of security that the child can swim. One of the water wings my dad placed on my sister came off and she went under. It all happened so fast. Upon noticing my sister under the water my dad jumped in the pool to save her. Thankfully she was ok. My mother kept reminding us how she almost drowned as a child. It was an event that was etched in my memory still today. My mom was never a big fan of swimming or water, but she made sure we learned to swim.

I was introduced to Infant Swimming Resource (ISR) when our first born was around 1 year of age. All of our own children have used their survival swimming skills while being under the watch of family and friends, may it be at a party, a hotel, a water park, or vacation. ISR truly gives children the ability to problem solve and save themselves in the water. We went on to train our other 3 children. About the time our third child was being trained, I decided that if the opportunity presented itself, I would become an ISR instructor.

About 11 years ago my dad passed and I thought about retiring from teaching ISR. We were at a State Swim Meet for our oldest and were speaking with a family on the team. We knew that their older child was in a wheelchair, but we had never asked what happened. We had assumed that he was simply born that way. The parents started speaking about how the child became disabled and it turned out that he was a near drowning victim at a pool party. He had survived, but with devastating results. Their perfectly healthy child was now bound to a wheelchair for life. I left the swim meet and felt Our Heavenly Father had picked that divine time to have the family tell their story.

Thanks to that family I am still teaching today and have branched off into beginning stroke for the swim team, along with survival swimming. I want to give this life saving skill to all children both locally and eventually nationally.

Over the years I have had the opportunity to connect with many children and give them the life saving skills not only in the water, but also the skills and confidence to know that if they can conquer the water and have fun while doing it, they can conquer anything in life. The beautiful and rewarding outcome of training a child is to see them blossom into the person they were born to be. It is a rewarding process watching them persevere while training and then acquiring the skills and having pride in their accomplishments.

The goal of the foundation is to reach as many children as we can. We want to give back to firefighters, paramedics, and police. As they are typically the first on scene for a drowning incident and see first-hand the devastation it can bring. We will have scholarships specifically for them.

Our military will also be eligible for scholarships, especially those that are enlisted and sacrifice so much to defend our country and our freedoms. Some of the other groups of children we want to provide lessons to are children of single moms, Foster Children, and those families that decide to adopt their foster child, parents who decide not to abort their children, and parents of multiples ( twins, triplets).

Our family is very involved with the swimming world and will eventually be providing swim team scholarships, private school scholarships for swimmers and eventually money to help college level swimmers.

Our love of family and community is what drives our desire to give back.

Sheryl Baskerville-Rothe
Safe Swim Foundation President