Alison Terry once aspired to be the first Black woman to represent the US in the Olympics. She fell shy of that goal by .02 seconds. She was crushed, but not defeated. She had tried giving up years earlier. That didn’t work.

Yesterday I mentioned a pool access issue in the South. Alison Terry grew up in San Diego, where there were no pools open year round. This hampered her ability to become a swim champion, but didn’t stop her.

After a rough patch during her college years, Alison rebounded to give her run for the Olympics a real chance. She didn’t make that first, but she made another: she is the first black woman on the USA swimming board of directors.

And because of Alison’s activism and influence, swimming pools are now open year round in San Diego. I am very proud of what she’s done. I’m also glad that she’s not finished. Her next goal is to increase the number of elite Black swimmers.

Something tells me Alison Terry usually gets what she wants.

The discussion on Diversity in Aquatics continues. Erroll Dupplessis brought up something that I immediately scoffed at. I thought access to a pool was an irrelevant, old fashioned issue. Then I asked my husband about it.

My husband, like Mr. Duplessis, grew up in the south. Mr. Duplessis tells us that pools in the south were closed to blacks in the 1960s through the early 80s. I asked my husband about it. He remembers trying to go swimming in the 80s and being told that the pool was closed.

I am shocked and appalled. And we wonder why more black folks don’t swim. And, as they say, if you don’t know your history, you’re doomed to repeat it. Hello, Philadelphia, summer of 2009.

Naji Ali goes on to say that one of the reasons captive Africans were tied down in the hulls of the slave ships was to prevent them from jumping in the water and swimming away.

That is a powerful image and legacy, quite different from the picture of the runaway slave captured or killed by an inability to swim.

So, what can we do? We can make concerted efforts to break the cycle of non-swimming. We can sign our children up for swim lessons and swim teams. If black swimming were as widespread as say, rollerskating back in the day, or basketball now, then more of our children would become swim teachers and coaches.

I know first-hand how effective black teachers are in the pool.

In short, this problem is not our fault, but it is our responsibility. We are capable of pulling ourselves out of this hole. We need to roll up our sleeves and get to work. What work do you think we need to do?

My cousin grew up with a community pool practically in her back yard. She and her sister loved to swim. My father was a non-swimmer, yet my brother and I both learned to swim. My father’s brothers were fraternal twins. One swam, one didn’t. All their children swam. The non-swimming brother had three sons on the high school swim team, in fact. The swimming brother was in the Navy. He’s my aforementioned cousin’s father. I’ve mentioned my father’s sister here before. She now loves to swim, and I’d frankly be surprised if her son didn’t know how to swim.

There’s a lot of talk about how non-swimming is generational. How is it that our generation in the family is all swim-literate, while the generation before us was almost swimming illiterate? Was the one sailor in the family enough to erase generations of non-swimming? Or was it just our parents’ desire to see us better off than they were, so they put us in the pool?

I don’t know. But I talked with my cousin today on Facebook, and she brought up another interesting fact: age matters in competitive swimming. She has two sons, and the younger one has been competing year-round in swimming for a year now. The older son just started the year-round competition, and it is harder for him to compete.

I found that true with my children. My daughter was forced to race 50s when she would rather have done 25s, because she was older when she started competing. My son started three years younger, working his way up to competing in 50s and 100s.

My swim team cousins probably started young, learning to swim at the Y, building their skills until they joined their high school swim teams. The youngest of those three recently started swimming again as an adult. He loves the workout, and is much fitter because of it.

My cousin had her boys in gymnastics before swimming. I had my older kids in swimming, and my younger kids in gymnastics, so I wondered which sport she preferred. She told me she preferred swimming, because “swimming can be a life long sport. I also think the risk of injury would have to be lower with swimming.”

Do you have any stories about swimming generations, or your age when you started swimming?

The Valley Country Club excluded the black day camp. USA Swimming is hosting a camp of its own. It’s also exclusive–called The Diversity Select Camp.

Obviously, the Diversity Select Camp has different goals than the Valley Country Club: The Diversity Select Camp aims to instill a vision of success and inspire athletes from ethnically under-represented populations to become leaders in the sport of swimming.

Whereas one club sought to exclude black kids, another camp seeks to include and expand the number of black kids in pools.

The deadline for the Colorado Springs camp is looming. Go here for your application, and send it in by March 1st.

I mentioned a while back that USA swimming had banned the super suits. Now they’ve issued guidelines for an acceptable suit. There is a list of suits that were submitted to and approved by FINA, the international governing body of swimming, diving, water polo, synchronized swimming and open water swimming.

Besides the specific suits on the list, USA swimming has ok’d a vaguer group of suits, ‘older suits.’ Older suits fit these criteria:

1. Swimsuits for men may not extend above the navel or below the knee and for women may not cover the neck, or extend past the shoulders or below the knee;

2. Material used for swimsuits can be only textile material which is defined as materials consisting of natural and/or synthetic, individual and non-consolidated yarns used to constitute a fabric by weaving, knitting, and/or braiding. Simply put, this would generally refer to suits made only from nylon or Lycra that do not have any rubberized material such as polyurethane or neoprene; and

3. No zippers or other fastening devices are allowed except for a waist tie on a brief or jammer.

But, not so fast, older suits! You’re ok for competition, but not for setting records or qualifying for international events. You’ll need to have a FINA approved suit for those events. Same thing goes for National records, etc.

So, to be safe, check and re-check the list.

I wonder how long the new records, made with the super suit will hold in this new medieval realm of swimsuit. Time will tell.

Do you follow Cullen on twitter yet? You should.

Although sometimes cryptic, (who is AJ, for example?), Cullen’s tweets are always informative.

Yesterday, he told his followers that he’d been gone for a while, and why. I looked back over Cullen’s tweets, and found he’d had a swim meet last month.

Of course, that warranted more searching to find out about a Cullen Jones swim meet in Dallas.

I found that Cullen’s team finished second in the meet, while my alma mater, U of Michigan won the meet.

Check in with Cullen on Twitter again soon to get the rest of the story.