By now many have heard of the glory that our Junior Lifeguards brought to Kauai in the National Championship competition that took place in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on Aug. 7. Our team of 22 Kauai youth garnered 48 medals, coming
By now many have heard of the glory that our Junior Lifeguards brought to Kauai in the National Championship competition that took place in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on Aug. 7. Our team of 22 Kauai youth garnered 48 medals, coming in second overall. A highly deserving East Coast team from Monmouth County, New Jersey came in first overall. Please note: A number of the teams had two or three times the number of members than we did.
So, what is this program really all about? Well, Junior Lifeguards is a nationwide program (and very, very strong in Australia also) in which youth between the ages of ages 8 and 17 get to spend time with professional lifeguards, learning not only about their own safety around the water, but also about how to keep others safe.
In Hawaii, the program has developed, with occasional hiccups, over the last 17 years. Of all the Hawaiian Islands, Kauai has turned out to be the one that has gone the most “all in” to the program. The key to our Kauai program’s success has been that our lifeguard supervisor and chief, Kalani Vierra, had the vision of this becoming a cornerstone program for Kauai’s youth. To this end, he and First Hawaiian Bank manager, Tom Canute, started the Kauai Lifeguard Association in 2005, hoping to be able to raise funds to support the program beyond the level of support the county is able to provide.
The KLA has since expanded its mission to include other key ocean safety programs (including, of course, the rescue tube program), but Junior Lifeguards continue to be a central part of KLA’s commitment. KLA believes that Junior Lifeguards add a key piece to Kauai’s very tough ocean safety puzzle by adding “force multipliers” to our beaches and our shores. We’re talking around 350-plus Junior Lifeguards a year. A huge collateral benefit is the kids themselves. Those of us involved with the program have witnessed many youth, not only become more skilled in the ocean and more watchful for all of us, but also become more self-confident in their overall (and often tumultuous) teenage lives. Our remarkable lifeguards/coaches teach them many things including personal safety, rescue skills, resuscitation skills, citizenship, drug-free choices and fire prevention, to mention just a few.
What about the competitive aspect of Junior Lifeguards, the aspect that brings glory to Kauai and rapture to our remarkable competitors? Why is this important? How does this fit into KLA’s ocean safety mission? What relevance do our 22 national championship stars and our 60-or-so 11-time state championship participants have for the other 300 Junior Lifeguards who enroll in the program every summer?
To answer these questions, I’ll quote Bob Burnside, keynote speaker at our recent Statewide Ocean Safety Conference. He is the founder of the United States Lifeguard Association (50th anniversary this year), retired L.A. lifeguard, and the author of a fine piece on the history of Junior Lifeguarding. Try Googling him. He’s in his 80s and he looks and acts like he’s approaching 60. He was and still is — now in age group competition — a ferocious national and international competitor and he is a legend for many achievements including advocating for lifeguard competitions for juniors as well as for professional lifeguards around the world. At our conference he told us: “Competition is for pushing us and for making us stronger and for making our competitors stronger – and this makes lifeguarding stronger. Then, once the competition is over, lifeguards are all one family, a family who loves doing what we do and who loves helping and saving others.” There you have it. Obviously there can be conflicts and issues that can at times cloud this beautiful vision, but those don’t take away from the vision.
Our Kauai Junior Lifeguards are phenomenal, whether or not they are the elite medalists. Our lifeguard/coaches are phenomenal, and I can put it best by saying that I have no hesitation entrusting our Kauai childrens’ lives to them (and my own life for that matter), even when our children are an ocean and a continent away from home.
There is one other phenomenal group that needs to be recognized, namely our 40 lifeguards who hold the fort and man the beaches while our six lifeguards/coaches are working with the summer-long Junior Lifeguard program! And this brings me to a final and editorializing comment: Our beach coverage can get stretched thin, at times perilously close to too thin, because of our lifeguard/coaches’ commitment to Kauai’s Junior Lifeguard program and our youth. (This very issue caused Oahu to take a one-year hiatus and they didn’t have a 2014 Junior Lifeguard program. I have been assured that they have worked through this issue with their administrators and politicians and they will restart it in 2015). In order to continue our own hugely successful youth program, as well as continue making our beaches even safer, we, Kauai, will need more lifeguards. Please, therefore, be advised that KLA will be hard-lobbying our newly elected county officials for more lifeguard positions in the next fiscal budget.
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Monty Downs, M.D., is president of the Kauai Lifeguard Association.
