The journey to becoming a six-time Howard University swimming record holder, a board member of the USA Swimming National Diversity Committee and a passionate advocate for water safety wasn’t an easy one for Miriam Lynch. But that adversity, she said, shaped both her career and her life’s mission.
Lynch, a 2004 graduate of Howard University and a 20-year swim program record holder, grew up in a military family, moving from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Germany and Saudi Arabia, swimming wherever she went. While the activity was something that Lynch and her sister enjoyed, their mother’s reasoning for getting them involved came from the loss of a loved one.
“My uncle, who I never got to know, was my mother’s oldest brother and pretty much the matriarch, like the next hope for the family. His senior year in high school, he went to a pool party and drowned,” Lynch said.
To this day, she credits her mother for how she responded to this adversity.
“My mom could’ve been like, ‘Oh, I am not putting my babies near the pool,’ which happens to a lot of us, right? Like, we have an experience, and we say, ‘I’m never going to do that.’ But what she did was, when I was old enough, we lived in Saudi Arabia, and she was like, ‘We live right across from the pool. My daughter’s gonna learn how to swim,’” she said.
This was the first wake-up call for Lynch, but it wouldn’t be her last.
She recounted a story of a close friend from high school named Donnie Lindsey. The two were not only close friends but also top athletes at their high school: Lynch for swimming and Lindsey for football.
“He would always come to my swim meets and be like, ‘You’re a fish,’ because I was always swimming,” Lynch said.
The two would go on to participate in Division I Sports in college — Lynch at Howard University and Lindsey at the University of Richmond.
But one night, Lynch got a call saying that Lindsey had passed away, and the cause of death was drowning.
“Why didn’t he tell me he didn’t know how to swim? Why didn’t we have that conversation? I would’ve helped him,” Lynch said.
She sees these tragedies as what made her purpose so clear.
Lynch joined Diversity in Aquatics, an organization established to help give young people of color resources necessary to learn water safety. In 2017, Lynch became chief executive director of the program.
In the same year, Lynch began coaching at Howard University where she had previously set six swim records of her own. The last of those records was broken in 2022, 19 years after Lynch set it. Alana Josey, a graduate student and a swimmer Lynch coaches at Howard was the one to break the final record, Lynch’s 1650 freestyle record of 18:30.45 finishing with a time of 18:14.92 at the Northeast Conference (NEC) Championships.
“She was training me the whole time for that race. I really looked up to her. It was crazy beating my mentor’s record,” Josey said when recounting the experience.
Looking back on her own swimming journey when she worked as lifeguard at parks around the city, Josey remembered the lack of water safety education that existed in her hometown and the prevalence of “the stigma around not knowing how to swim”.
“There were a lot of Black youth we had to save because parents weren’t watching them, or they just thought they could swim and just jumped in the deep end. Knowing that that’s a need in our community, I think she’s doing an amazing thing,” she said.
As an assistant coach of Howard University’s swim team since 2017, Lynch has made it her mission to make sure the athletes that she trains are role models to their community outside of the pool as well.
“We get to show people that you can do this. No matter if you’re Black, brown, white it doesn’t matter. You can still learn how to swim and be safe while doing it,” Josey said.
When Lynch isn’t coaching, she is focusing her attention towards organizing Diversity in Aquatics in-person events to build community and encourage the youth to get to the pool. One such event — the Water Safety Festival — was held at Digital Harbor High School in Baltimore, Maryland on April 4.
As kids and parents filed in, advocates shared the reasons they are so passionate about the subject.
“We always start with the why. The reality is drowning is a neglected public health threat that impacts everyone. It’s one of the leading causes of death among children, ages one to four. It’s the second leading cause of death among children, ages five to 19,” said Dr. Angela Beale Tawfeeq, a board member and director of research and education for the Diversity in Aquatics.
Beale Tawfeeq is also an associate professor of health and physical education teacher education at Rowan State University and a member of the American Red Cross Scientific Aquatic Council.
“When we’re talking about public health, we’re talking about the social determinants, so you’re talking about social economics, you’re talking about race, you’re talking about gender, you’re talking about all of those elements. And the reality is if you deny communities access to facilities and education, they will lose that knowledge,” she said.
The youngest advocate there was Saana Chege, a 16-year-old junior in high school who published a book titled A Diver Like Me. The book chronicled her journey to becoming a competitive diver.
“I started diving and I noticed that there weren’t many people who looked like me, so I wanted to encourage young Black and Brown kids to learn to swim and also try diving, because I know it starts with swimming before they can get into diving,” Chege said.
Her father encouraged her to swim from a young age for water safety, but also to eliminate the stigma of water that exists within the Black community.
“The fear is ingrained in us because it’s been that way since the beginning, so, you know, we have to change that, but it takes time and work,” he said.
Lynch believes that helping people understand that history is a foundational piece of the Diversity in Aquatics mission, Lynch said.
“Policies and practices were developed to stop us from having a relationship with the water. This issue mirrors everything else that has happened to Black and Brown communities throughout history,” Lynch said.
