Summer Camp 2026

By Yvonne Liu

This summer, Wave of Change Foundation organized free swim lessons for children at our local community pool in order to help them build water safety skills, confidence in the water, and develop a love for the sport that we as instructors have practiced for so long. 

We hosted lessons almost every weekend with regional and national level high school swimmers volunteering as instructors. Each lesson was personally tailored to fit the swim level of the child. Some barely knew how to swim while others were hoping to join a competitive swim team or were already in one. We started each lesson with dry-land and stretching exercises and then moved on to assigning coaches to swimmers. Every coach had 1-3 children to teach and often personally entered the water to help them learn. At the end of practice, we played games like Marco Polo or Sharks and Minnows. Not only did we help swimmers improve their stroke, we also had lots of fun! 

Through this experience, we not only gained confidence as instructors but also developed deeper insights into coaching. Before the program started, every one of us instructors were nervous to begin teaching, as many of us had never coached before. However, as we started teaching, we learned how to efficiently utilize and transmit the amount of knowledge and experience we have gained over the years, and we realized that we could actually teach very well. Every time a student learned something we taught and brought it to the next class, or finally picked up a skill they had been previously struggling with, we felt a sense of accomplishment as coaches. Over the summer, not only did students improve their swimming skills but the coaches also developed new teaching skills and gained confidence as instructors. With this newly fostered knowledge, we hope to continue creating opportunities like this to make swimming more accessible to people in our community.