Friday’s drowning death of former Orangeburg-Wilkinson and Newberry College basketball player Kendrick Johnson offered tragic irony for Crystal Nixon.

Teaching swimming lessons, particularly to young people, has been a labor of love for the South Carolina State aquatics program director and certified life guard instructor trainer for the local American Red Cross. Having read the statistics regarding the high number of drowning deaths in South Carolina, Nixon has tried to make teaching swimming lessons in Orangeburg County a top priority.

“It’s not my mission to create Olympic swimmers,” she said. “It’s my mission to create people who will not drown in the water and when they grow up and have kids and take a vacation...and go to water parks or whatever, that family can swim and those parents can show their kids how to swim and they can keep it going and going.”

With Monday’s reopening of the refurbished swimming facility at the Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial Center, Nixon hopes to promote a ‘change in culture’ will help prevent such future swimming tragedies like Johnson.

“That should have never happened,” Nixon said. “That’s almost...it’s a tragedy that was totally unnecessary. It was totally preventable. I don’t know where he was swimming. I don’t know what kind of supervision was going on, but as an administrator who does this for a living, there’s so many things which went wrong there.” The accident which claimed Johnson, whom relatives said was not a strong swimmer, only highlighted what Nixon sees as the necessity of having a swimming facility in Orangeburg. Unlike in her native state, she finds such public facilities lacking in South Carolina which makes it even more difficult to encourage young people how to swim.

“Growing up in Florida, we had a recreation pool in my neighborhood that the community paid for,” she said. “Not the community subdivision, but the county and have so many stations all around. That was a long time ago. I’m here (in South Carolina) and I don’t see that.”

Thanks to a $500,000 county grant using funds obtained through the penny sales tax, the Orangeburg County Council and S.C. State were able to join forces to repair the pumping system, installing a backup and alarm system repaint the walls and provide upgrades that will enable such programs as senior citizen rehabilitation and aqua aerobics.

“I think this is very important,” Orangeburg County Council Chairman Johnny Wright said. “As you know, we’re working on getting our aquatics center and that’s one of the significant ways of affording our kids opportunities to get swimming lessons and having the facilities here at (S.C.) State and they were not being utilized because of renovations, that was a very important stipulation. I hope our people will really use it because it’s very important.”

For Monday’s reopening, the pool was made available to students from Dover Elementary and Felton Laboratory schools who took lessons from pool operator Marcellus Rice and his lifeguard assistants Danielle Williams and Deanna Stokes. Nixon said the facility will be made available to all Orangeburg County public and private schools, as well as S.C. State students and faculty for swimming lessons during the fall.

Even more important, according to Nixon, is having the full backing of the S.C. State administration. School President George Cooper, an avid swimmer dating back to his youth in Tallahassee, Fla., said the facility’s reopening was a ‘long-awaited’ day for the school and community.

To sign up for the summer fitness and swimming lessons offered by S.C. State, call (803) 536-8067.

n T&D Senior Sports Writer Thomas Grant Jr. can be reached by e-mail at tgrant@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5547. Discuss this and other stories on-line at TheTandD.com.

 

You must be logged in to comment.