National Paralympic Champ Wants to Teach A Million Underserved People to Swim
Most mornings, Jamal Hill, one of the top Paralympic swimmers in the world and recent bronze medal winner at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, drives almost 45 minutes each way from his Inglewood home to train at the Verdugo Aquatic Center in Burbank. Much like food deserts, where residents often need to go to painstaking lengths to find fresh food in groceries rather than subsist on fare offered at liquor stores or fast food franchises, Hill finds himself making a taxing commute to get into the water. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that African Americans were more likely than whites across all ages to drown. Black children five and 19 years old are 5.5 times more likely to drown than their white counterparts.
These statistics so angered Hill that he started coming up with solutions, which took the form of his nonprofit Swim Up Hill. Its mission? To teach 1,000,000 people to swim.
For Hill, it’s about decreasing drowning and promoting greater aquatic competency across the board, but underneath that is a restorative justice issue that empowers a population of people that have not had access to aquatics. “Swimming is a human right,” Hill declares, who is also an ambassador on the Team USA Council for Racial & Social Justice.
According to Hill, the financial cost of swimming lessons is a large barrier, but there are other factors at play: a generational fear of water, lack of access to water features and long learning periods that add to the cost of learning to swim.
When Swim Up Hill began, Hill kept asking himself, "How do we introduce them to the pool environment without scaring them?" Shortly after this, the bowl, bench and bucket curriculum started to emerge in collaboration with his coach, Wilma Wong.
The "Bowl-Bench-Bucket" curriculum is a method of teaching swimming that he and Wong came up with pre-pandemic in 2018-2019, a full year before the quarantine. They had come up with a Zoom-type swimming curriculum because they knew some people had a fear of the water, and many others did not have access to a pool.
Wong explains more, “While training, we have collaborated on working with people who cannot swim due to traumas, phobias and basic lack of access to water and swimming lessons. We have a trainer’s manual coming out titled, ‘A Bowl, A Bench, and a Bucket,’ which gives both professionals and individuals the knowledge to train themselves with the basics of breathing and moving in the water with tools they already have at home.”
The bowl exercise is used to learn breathing techniques. A second exercise using buckets will simulate pushing and pulling the water. A third exercise uses a bench and buckets to help the swimmer learning how to time taking a breath. Finally, all of these exercises would be pooled together to simulate a swimming experience.
"The two hardest parts to swimming," Wong says, "is coordinating breathing with the hands. People can practice this skill at home, so when they finally get to a pool, the training wheels will be off, and they can begin to swim in an average of about an hour."
They started the pilot program in 2019, and by summer 2020, they had taught over 100 people to swim from ages 4 to 70. After the pandemic hit, it ended up being a serendipitous moment to introduce more people to their curriculum. This was when they started to teach people to swim via Zoom in partnership with Airbnb.
The one million mark is an ambitious goal, but one that Hill isn’t afraid to tackle. After all, the same spirit that drives him to fight for swim equity is the one that led him to the top of his sport. “I love Jamal’s audacity,” said Hill’s friend and longtime Los Angeles County urban planner Jonathan Pacheco Bell. “When you’re trying to improve people’s lives, you have to be bold.”
Relentless Spirit
Hill started competitive swimming from the time he was eight years old. Right off the bat, he was winning races in pools at competitions in locations like the Westchester YMCA, but one day when he was 10, he was caught off guard by what he now knows was the first sign of CMT. “My shoulder went limp. When I got to the hospital, my whole body [had] gone limp,” Hill says in a short film about his career.
“I went from swimming and winning races,” Hill says, “to having to wear a sling.” Hill spent a short amount of time in Children’s Hospital and was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT), a degenerative nerve disease that usually appears in adolescence or early adulthood. The main symptoms include muscle weakness, decreased muscle size and reduced sensation. For the next five years, he did not do a lot of swimming.
Though he did step away from the pool for a few years, his parents instilled in him a growth mindset, and he never let anything slow him down. He knew he had CMT, but he not only never let it bring him down, he even kept it a secret. The relentless spirit and determination that Hill learned from his parents also made him someone that always looks to create solutions.
His swimming coach Wong explains, “When people see Jamal, they often ask what his disability is. Not all disabilities are apparent. Jamal is an elite athlete and master illusionist as he walks and moves as if nothing is wrong. People in the CMT world look at him as a walking miracle.” Hill’s enormous willpower serves him in both the pool and with his nonprofit. “Jamal is passionate about using time and motion efficiently,” says Wong.
Hill remained discreet about his CMT condition for over a decade until Coach Wong called him out one day and got him to talk about it. Wong is also a healer, and she specializes in helping people maximize their athleticism. “He was training with the team daily,” Wong says, “and I noticed he was getting out of the pool similar to one of my cerebral palsy clients. I finally asked him if he wanted to tell me something about his body I needed to know to coach him better. When Jamal finally revealed he had CMT, I was able to steer him towards joining the Paralympic movement and subsequently making the USA Para-swimming team to bring home medals from Peru at the 2019 Para Pan American Games.”
Before discussing more about Hill’s evolution as a paralympic swimmer: a quick primer on the Paralympics. The Paralympics are a periodic series of international multi-sport events involving athletes with a range of disabilities, including impaired muscle power, impaired passive range of movement, limb deficiency, leg length difference and other disabilities like vision impairment. The Paralympics first started in 1948 with injured World War II veterans, and one of the first events was wheelchair basketball.
As the website paralympic.org explains, “the word ‘Paralympic’ derives from the Greek preposition ‘para’ (beside or alongside) and the word ‘Olympic.’ Its meaning is that Paralympics are the parallel Games to the Olympics and illustrates how the two movements exist side-by-side.” Dating back to 1988 in Seoul, the Summer Paralympics have been held in the same city and immediately following the Olympics.
Working with Wong has been a transformative experience for Hill. At first, he was relieved to have someone who wanted to understand what it was that he was struggling with. "But soon after that," he says, "when she proposed that perhaps I shift my focus away from the Olympics and onto the Paralympics, I wasn’t ready to face that side of me, let alone showcase it to the world. Not only did I not want others to know there was anything wrong with me... I didn’t want to believe it myself.”
Six months later, he was training like it never happened. Then one day, “an All-star British swimmer Lewis Clifford came out for a training camp with us," Hill recalls. "He and I get up on the blocks, dive in and race one length down the pool. Afterward, we climb out to take a look at the footage. Off the dive alone, he was more than two meters ahead of me! He comments, "Mate, did you know that your legs don't work? You should think about joining the Paralympics.’”
“Pow! Once again, my ego takes a blow," Hill laughs. "Only this time, it doesn't sting as much. In a moment, I reflect ... Why would this man who I’ve only just met notice something that only one other person in my career has seen... back to reality, I swallow my pride and think that this must be a divine sign. I was being led to take a path to my dreams that I had never considered.”
Two months later, Hill went to his first Para-swim meet and won his first National Championship later that year. His career had truly begun, and he looked forward to Tokyo 2020 (now 2021), Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028.
“Jamal thinks about how to make swimming easier and faster for himself," Wong says, "and in turn applies that knowledge to teaching others. I believe his disability has given him a superpower to find innovative solutions to problems. He cannot always do what others can do naturally. Jamal will find a way beyond the norm, and we are seeing that with his swimming method."
These days, Hill continues training and working toward the Paralympics. He has already been to both Utah and San Antonio for Paralympic swimming events in January 2021. His typical day begins at 5:30 a.m. with training and swimming laps at the Verdugo Aquatic Center. He spends an average of five hours a day concentrated on training and recovery.
He also still manages to find time for his role as Executive Director of Swim Up Hill. The organization has big plans for 2022 as it solidifies its infrastructure. "We'll be entering our third year of operation," Hill states, "developing partnerships with adaptive sport organizations to create a standard swim curriculum. We will also be releasing several books geared toward middle school-aged children and looking to partner with city programs to increase their capacity of service while reducing the cost to their aquatic departments."
Hill wants to break generational patterns and tired stereotypes and see to it that everyone has access to learning how to swim. His combination of competitive swimming, entrepreneurial spirit and community building makes him the fusion of Michael Phelps and Nipsey Hussle in one up and coming young champion from Inglewood.
Editor's note: The article title has been updated to reflect that Jamal Hill is a National Paralympic Champion. He also won a bronze medal at the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics in the Men’s 50m Freestyle.
