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By Poppy Bishop
Do you remember back in 5th grade, at EIS, when we did swimming in gym class? Remember all of those memories you made with your friends? The splashing and the “I’m going to get to the other side of the pool first!!”. Those were the good days, and I am here to bring them to the EJHS. In this article I am stating why we should have a swimming section in gym class. There will also be many explanations as to why we should have a swimming unit because swimming is conditioning for other sports, kids need to know how to swim at a young age, and a small interview with Mr. Williamson (the EIS gym teacher) to tell us how he communicated with the highschool to get us to the pool.
My first reason is that Swimming is amazing conditioning for other sports. Swimming can help with tons of sports such as basketball, soccer, and baseball! “According to Olympic gold medalist Janet Evans, “Swimming is the ultimate all-in-one fitness package, working most muscles in the body in a variety of ways with every stroke.” Another thing about swimming that makes it good for other sports is that it is very low impact, which helps with injury in other sports.
Another reason swimming should be a unit in EJHS gym class is that kids NEED to know how to swim! Knowing swimming skills is extremely important. Imagine if something happened to you where swimming was necessary to survival, you could drown. Similar to learning another language, it is easier to learn how to swim when you are younger.
I did a small interview with Mr. Williamson, the EIS gym teacher, about how he got the kids over to the High School for swimming. He explained that 30 years ago he and the aquatic director got together, and the aquatic director said that it would be really cool if Mr. Williamson took his gym class kids to the pool 3-5 times during the winter for some basic swimming skills. He says, “If you can get people on board, it's not really difficult, the hard thing is whether people are willing to sacrifice their time.” He also says that it is very difficult to coordinate with everyone - the teachers, the transportation, the high school swim instructor. I think we can all agree that it will be difficult to figure everything out, but once we do it will be amazing for everyone!
In conclusion, I believe that it would really help our school to have a swimming section in gym class. It would help as training for other sports and it is good for kids to know how to swim. I hope that this article opened your mind to the possibilities of swimming in school.
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