City Swim Project in Buffalo Thriving With Diversity, Building Toward Future of Swimming
Mike Switalski grew up in a mostly white town, went to a mostly white college and competed in a mostly white sport.
It gave him a narrow understanding of swimming, but when he got to Buffalo, everything changed.
“I was hired at a swim club and one of the parents was an assistant principal in an inner-city school in Buffalo. She wanted kids at her school to start swimming,” said Switalski, who grew up outside Milwaukee and swam at Wisconsin-Whitewater. “My experience, for the most part, was that Black people don’t really swim.
“I told her I would have to go in and talk to the kids directly and be the one to put the permission slip in their hands at school. I did that and out of 660 kids at that school, we got 500 permission forms back. That got me thinking about my experience with people of color. Maybe it was disinterest in swimming, but maybe it was something more.”
It was so much more.
Swiatalski has been working in Buffalo ever since.
“It has been a very unique ride,” he said. “I started looking into it a little bit more and started realizing about household incomes in Buffalo. We made the program work. We couldn’t take all 500 kids. We took 50 kids to start in 1998.”
In addition to teaching in the inner-city, he has started the City Swim Project to help all kids in the area learn to swim, which began in 2012.
Photo Courtesy: City Swim Project
“We launched the program in 2012 and started with 15 kids,” he said. “Within a few months, we were using a local YMCA. The membership started questioning why the YMCA members weren’t getting the same opportunity. So we worked out more pool time with them and we had 80 kids. In 2022, our highwater mark was 492 kids in the program overall and 90-95 is non-white and 80% is low income.”
The success got the attention of a lot of people within the sport, especially USA Swimming.
“We became an outreach for USA Swimming,” he said. “We had 4% of the USA’s diversity in the country. We had the highest number of diverse swimmers in the country. We have received several grants over the years.”
That includes one from USA Swimming this year.
“I appreciate the validation from USA Swimming, but for me, the greater reward is the validation that I get from having the trust of the membership. Without that trust, I would not have USA Swimming’s attention or support,” he said.
The City Swim Project has grown to included 15-20 employees, a small competitive program of about 20 swimmers and has services such as tutoring, nutritional education and financial help.
“We are a bit outside the norm of what you see in USA Swimming,” he said.
But for Switalski, it is not only the present, but building the sport to a sustainable future.
“We are living within a changing demographic within the U.S. The data tells us the current majority will be the minority by like 2045,” Switalski said. “And USA Swimming is 75% white. If that is our reality, and we don’t learn to change with the times and grow our membership into other demographics as a society, we are going to be left behind as a sport.”
Switalski file:
- Commissioner, New York State Commission on Childhood Drowning Prevention
- Western New York Afterschool Network
- General Chair, Niagara Swimming
- Committee Member, USA Swimming Club Development Committee
- Subject Matter Expert, USA Swimming Foundation
- City Swim Project Board of Directors
Photo Courtesy: City Swim Project
