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By Stephen Press
Hometown Weekly Staff
"Car-ter! Car-ter! Car-ter!"
The squeaky choir of children, standing patiently in line beside a diving board, chanted in unison. At the end of the diving board, a toddler stood, weighing his options. To jump or not to jump? That is the question.
"Car-ter! Car-ter! Car-ter!"
Finally, succumbing to either the positive peer pressure or perhaps the 80-degree heat and humidity, the boy jumped into the pool. His friends (and a smattering of sunglass-wearing parents and guardians in the gallery) let out a round of cheers and applause as the next kid in line carefully walked to her place on the board. Meanwhile, the successful jumper paddled away with a smile on his face.
Swimming lessons are back at Rosemary Pool, and the scene seems timeless. The lessons, a Needham institution for years, run every morning until the pool opens to the general public.
For the children who had the turquoise waters of the pool all to themselves (and a few instructors, of course), it seemed an all-too-ideal start to the day. Beat the searing heat? Check. Hang out with your buddies? Check. Have a whole lot of fun? That's a big check.
"Soha loves swimming," said Helen Romano of her four-year-old granddaughter, who was among the beaming, splashing children. "Last year, it was a little different, but this year, she's having a good time. She's a little bit older now, so she's ready."
Even those who weren't quite ready seemed to be enjoying themselves. Paige Bass, whose six-year-old son Sawyer was among the assembled "to get over his fear of getting his face wet," noticed an improvement in her son's relationship with the water.
"It is getting better! I've seen more progress this week than we've seen at a couple other places where we've done swimming lessons," she said. "I think part of it is that it's every day, consecutively, instead of once a week."
"He looks forward to this," she said, reaffirming Sawyer's growing love of swimming.
Making the kids' transition to the water even easier, they have a full cast of enthusiastic swim instructors as mentors.
"We're just teaching them how to swim," Jared Cotton, who spearheads the lessons, humbly states. "With the lower levels, we're just trying to get them really comfortable in the water, trying to lead them up to the actual swimming they'll be doing [as they get older]. In the higher levels, we start to add in more techniques and refine the stroke.
" Seems like a pretty sweet gig - sharing one's love of swimming with a new generation, all while hanging out at the pool on a sweltering summer morning. "On hot days, it's really nice to cool off," acknowledges Cotton with a smile while his colleagues share a laugh a few feet away, "and you've got to do it for your job anyway."
