Bobby Guntoro is the head coach of UNCW’s swimming and diving team. He helped run the program, which offered four free 45-minute swim lessons to about 90 kids ages 6-12.
WHQR visited the pool where lessons were taking place during the last week of the series. Guntoro counted off the different groups of students.
“You can see right here. We set up 11 different classes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. So yeah, this is exciting. You can feel the energy coming in," he said.
Samantha Dugan is a senior on the team and has given back to the community through these free lessons since her freshman year.
“I was with my kids every lesson, and that was just beneficial for the kids because they got to know us. They got more comfortable with us because they're already uncomfortable in the water, so it is better for them to be comfortable with their instructors,” she said.
It’s quite the operation — they have almost a one-to-one ratio for each lesson. Last Thursday evening’s session had 25 swimmers to about 20 adults.
Ann Freeman, who grew up in coastal Brunswick County, is retired but worked on a $50,660 grant from The Endowment in 2022 to teach kids to swim. She and former UNCW professor Dr. Alyson Fleming acquired the grant based on some swimming pilot program work, and then UNCW staff ran the 'Learn-to-Swim' program. One component of that grant was running free lessons for DC Virgo students at the Northside Pool for about two weeks.
Through that grant, she became supportive of Guntoro's team.
“Wilmington is a coastal community. We're surrounded by water, with the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean. Everybody needs to know how to swim. Everybody deserves that opportunity to take lessons, but it's not always available, and it's definitely not affordable. So, we need to take a serious look at that, and how we can change that, and what we can do about it,” Freeman said.
Learning to swim is about affordability and access. Guntoro said they would regularly charge about $25 per lesson per child. He said he’s doing what he can to offer this opportunity — even without grant funding — but accessibility is something the community needs to continue to work on.
“I'm head coach at UNCW, and I get home to see my kids at 4:30 p.m., 4:45 p.m. at the earliest, and I couldn't take them to the public pool this past summer," he said. "We've got to do a better job; I'm in a position to offer some free swim lessons and some more education to our community, right? And this is a challenge for the City of Wilmington. ‘Hey, you want to get to work? Let's get to work.'”
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Later in the summer of 2025, the City of Wilmington and the YMCA of Southeastern NC extended those hours in August so working families could access the pool. However, they didn’t this past summer.
In May, Josh Gravette, the executive director of the Nir Family YMCA told WHQR that, regarding the extension of hours until 7 p.m., “We found that usage was very limited outside of scheduled events and rentals. Based on that experience, the YMCA and the City collectively decided to continue operating the pools with a 5 p.m. weekday closing time for the 2026 season.”
He added, though, “We always appreciate community feedback [...], and needs related to additional swim times or extended hours. As we evaluate pool operations and programming opportunities in the future, community input remains an important part of those conversations.”
Nonetheless, when kids show up for these free lessons with Guntoro — it’s a chance to make major improvements. He gets in the water to help, too.
“We worked together with this young boy; he's about 11 years old, didn't know how to swim at all in the beginning, and just in the first session, he was able to swim five yards on his own. Today, this is the fourth day; today we took him in a dive well, and he swam all the way for about half of the pool, and then swam back by himself in a 15-foot-deep pool,” he said.
While Dugan is in her final year swimming at UNCW, she’s also been an ocean lifeguard in New Jersey. In the ocean, stakes are high because of rip currents, which form when there are breaks or holes in the sandbar and the water is rushing out to sea; while they won’t pull a person under, swimmers can get tired and drown. People can swim to the side to exit the rip, then swim back to shore.
“So, doing this is just so so important, and I urge every parent to get their kids into swim lessons if they can before ever taking them to a beach,” Dugan said.
For Freeman, she got her Master’s in Public Administration at UNCW, and this was her final project — the importance of getting everyone in the community into the pool for this life skill.
“In high school, I had a classmate who drowned five days after graduation, and then I started thinking back over my life and other people that I was connected to. I could come up on, you know, 10 people, African American people who drowned, and I'm thinking, like, why is that?” Freeman said.
She found in her research that “it didn't matter how well-educated an African American person was, or their income level, if the parents didn't swim, 95% of the time the children didn't swim.”
So Freeman — and Guntoro and his team — are going to continue working on providing access and affordability to the community. They’re hoping to expand next year into higher age group levels.
Getting adults who never learned to swim is also a priority.
