By STEVE GALLUZZO | Sports Editor
Private swim teacher Sharon Minasian Skowron announced that last week, the Class of 2023—consisting of 25 young students—received their trophies upon completing their long-distance freestyle swims.
Minasian Skowron’s mother, Diane, gave private lessons for 46 years in her 52-foot pool in the backyard of her upper Bienveneda home, retiring in 2010. Minasian Skowron began offering instruction over 40 years ago. Since then, several generations of local children have graduated.
All of Minasian Skowron’s students come to her through referrals. She primarily teaches at her house a few blocks from her mom’s, and said she believes it is never too soon to start learning how to blow bubbles along with floating and turning over techniques. Her “pool school” kids typically range from 4 to 12 years old.
“All year I teach my athletes that age isn’t the most important factor in determining how long they’ll be able to swim, but rather how long they’ve been swimming, how hard they’ve practiced and how often they can get in the pool to train,” Minasian Skowron said. “For example, some of the swimmers this year are older but started swimming later and only trained barely one year. Most, though, have learned strokes, including side breadths in my weekly lessons, then moved on join one of my small, one-hour-per-week teams.”
There, Minasian Skowron said, they learn skills, like floating and treading, and even how to do it all in heavy clothes, in case they have an unexpected fall.
“There are four little ones this year who earned medals for what I call the ‘Clothed Safely Plunge,’” Minasian Skowron continued. “The idea is that once they’ve experienced how it feels and what they need to do a little differently when clothed, hopefully they’ll panic less and successfully help themselves out of a scary situation.”
Some of the swimmers Minasian Skowron works with continue to work on technique and speed each year, because they want to or have already joined a swim team or water polo program at a place like Westside Aquatics, TSM Aquatic or LA Water Polo.
“Still others use the sport as a great cross-train for other sports and healthy movement,” Minasian Skowron said. “Then there are the surfers in the group who are working on increasing their strength and endurance as they continue to go out in bigger and rougher waves.
“Many people ask how it’s possible for this age or that person to swim so far but I tell them what I tell my swimmers, it’s like walking instead of running. Once you have an efficient stroke where you rock through the water and are able to take plenty of easy rolling breaths it’s like walking. And while most people can’t run very far, they can walk almost forever if they have to. Therefore, these swimmers don’t have a time limit, they just have to keep a good freestyle going, and I’ll stay counting the lengths for as long as they want to go and they often go for hours.”
Here are this year’s graduates and the distances they swam:
Not pictured: JJ Wolf – 1/2 mile
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