Lifeguard Training

While on holiday, I was traveling in Airlie beach. On Saturday morning I was relaxing by the lagoon when a large group of children and lifeguards came. The parents were standing around so I went over to inquire about what was going on. The mother I spoke to had two daughters in the program. She explained to me that this was a public program and was very cheap compared to the YMCA prices that she had previously paid. The program was a training program for water safety starting at age eight. Unlike the nippers, it was not for a competition but rather just for preparing to be safe in the water and likely become lifeguards. She said that the only real requirement to be able to join is that the children have to be able to swim. One of the women who was running the program was actually the physical education teacher and her daughter's school so she said it was a very popular community thing. The kind of activities I observed them doing was practicing the correct way to enter the water to save someone, how to hold someone's body if you have to bring them in, and how to use a noodle to help someone float above the water. The children learned these skills very quickly and it was evident that they were all pretty strong swimmers. It is very interesting to me how popular water training is. While most people in the US learn to swim, there are far less that go on to become lifeguards. In Australia, it seems like an extremely high percentage of people get lifeguard certified.