Every week, in pools across Arizona and around the country, swim school instructors do work that is fundamentally about prevention. It doesn’t always look dramatic. It looks like a toddler learning to float on their back, a nervous six-year-old finally putting their face in the water, an adult swimming across a pool for the first time. But new data from Arizona underscores just how much that work matters.
The newly published Arizona Drowning Data Report (CDC Foundation, August 2026) puts numbers behind what swim educators see every day. Children ages 1 to 4 had the highest drowning rates of any age group across every outcome studied, emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths. Among child drowning fatalities reviewed through Arizona’s Child Fatality Review program, inability to swim was identified as a contributing circumstance in 63.4% of cases, and lack of supervision in 48.2%. Nearly 90% of the cases in which inability to swim was reported involved children ages 1 to 4. And these tragedies overwhelmingly weren’t happening in lakes and rivers. Two-thirds of the child drowning fatalities reviewed occurred in pools, hot tubs, or spas, and 91% of those occurred on private property.
Those findings reinforce the role swim schools can play in drowning prevention. The report itself recommends expanding access to swimming lessons and establishing standardized skill benchmarks, including floating, treading water, and swimming set distances, to improve children’s water competency.
Advocacy Is Part of the Job
USSSA believes that running a great swim school isn’t just about what happens in the water. It’s also about shaping the policies, standards, and public awareness that make communities safer. That’s why advocacy has become a core part of our mission alongside education, member support, and industry standards.
Over the past several years, USSSA has worked to bring the swim school perspective into water safety policy conversations, showing up at legislative hearings, contributing to public comment processes, and partnering with organizations across the drowning prevention field to make sure the voice of frontline swim educators isn’t missing from the rooms where decisions get made. Reports like this one from Arizona reinforce why that seat at the table matters: they name inability to swim as a leading, preventable contributor to child drowning deaths, and they explicitly call for expanding access to swim lessons and establishing standardized water-competency benchmarks. That’s not just a validation of what our members do every day, it’s a policy roadmap, and USSSA intends to help drive it forward.
Turning Passion Into Influence: A Session at the National Conference
Caring about water safety is the easy part, swim school owners already do. Turning that passion into real influence with lawmakers, school boards, and community leaders is harder, and it’s a skill that can be learned.
That’s the focus of an upcoming session at the USSSA National Conference, where attendees will be introduced to the 7 Actions of Highly Effective Advocates, a practical framework for showing up as a more credible, persuasive, and effective voice for water safety in your own community. Whether you’ve never contacted a legislator before or you’re a seasoned advocate looking to sharpen your approach, this session is designed to give you concrete tools you can put to use as soon as you’re back home.
Because the truth is, the people best positioned to advocate for water safety aren’t just policy experts, they’re the swim school owners and instructors who see, every single day, what’s at stake when a child can or can’t swim. Reports like the Arizona Drowning Data Report give us the evidence. Sessions like this one give us the skills. What USSSA members bring is the credibility and the community trust that no report or session can manufacture on its own.
We hope to see you there.
