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When I was in 7th grade, the 7th and 8th graders went to camp for a week in the spring. This camp had a pool — not Olympic size or even 25 meter, but it was substantial with a deep end and a shallow end. In order to be able to use the pool, you had to swim the length of it once, starting in the deep end. There were about 50 of us, and we lined up to swim the length of the pool, and all of us made it easily.
All of us except Al. Al was easily the best athlete in our school, and he became a three-year starting quarterback at an SF Bay Area high school power, along with their starting point guard in basketball. You see, Al’s family were recent immigrants form Sicily, and Al had never been in a pool before, but he wanted to splash around with the rest of us. None of us knew Al didn’t know how to swim, he was the best athlete in our school (he beat me in the championship of our team’s one-on-one contest by a score of 12-1). He stood back at the pool house and took a running leap into the pool, jumping as far as he could.
He came up spluttering and red-faced, in a near-panic, dog paddling to reach the other side. We were all mute as we watched him struggle, then cheered him on the last 20 feet. And Al got to play in the pool.
There was a time when prominent Eastern universities required their undergraduates to swim a 50-yard lap before receiving a diploma. Cornell introduced it in 1905 at the urging of a professor and army officer, Frank Barton. Princeton added a swimming requirement in 1911 and prided itself on having the most demanding swimming test, 220 yards. Eleanor Elkins Widener, an heiress who donated $2 mms. to Harvard demanded that Harvard adopt a swimming requirement in memory of her son Harry, a 1907 Harvard grad who died on the Titanic.
That tradition persisted from the early 1900s. In 1977, Temple University found that 42% of four year universities still mandated a swim test for graduation, but by 1997, researchers at North Carolina State University found that the number of colleges requiring swim tests had fallen to just 5%. The last holdouts were Berea, Bryn Mawr, Columbia, MIT, and Swarthmore. The final universities closed it out in 2022 (Williams), 2023 (Hamilton), and 2024 (Washington & Lee). In 2022, Dartmouth’s faculty voted to scrap the swimming requirement starting with the class of 2026.
Interestingly, Williams voted to eliminate the swimming requirements because 82% of the people who failed were people of color. In 2024, Cornell voted to reinstate and retain the swimming requirement precisely because of that reason on the theory that it was incumbent upon Cornell to ensure that all of its students could swim as a life lesson.
All of the military academies, including Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, U. S. Merchant Marine and VMI have an emphasis on physical fitness, including swimming requirements for graduation. They are the last holdouts.
A once-proud tradition is becoming awkward for elite universities
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It still amazes me to this day, tbe lack of basic swimming skills in the African American community, even though most public high schools generally has swimming as part of the school year in P.E. I lost a great teammate in Kansas City, Joe Delaney- he saved three kids from drowning yet in the same incident ended up drowning himself… He grew up and died in Monroe, Louisiana…
“I remember that one fateful day when Coach took me aside. I knew what was coming. "You don't have to tell me," I said. "I'm off the team, aren't I?" "Well," said Coach, "you never were really ON the team. You made that uniform you're wearing out of rags and towels, and your helmet is a toy space helmet. You show up at practice and then either steal the ball and make us chase you to get it back, or you try to tackle people at inappropriate times." It was all true what he was saying. And yet, I
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