World's Largest Swimming Lesson

What motivates team WLSL

The World’s Largest Swimming Lesson™ is a promotional event designed to build awareness and generate local and national press attention about the vital importance of teaching kids to swim to help prevent drowning. What’s exciting about the WLSL event is that so many organizations and individual aquatic facilities are coming together to make it happen. The WLSL event helps capture the passion we have for this critical issue as individuals and focuses all that energy on one message for one day.

The 2023 World’s Largest Swimming Lesson™ took place on Thursday, June 22nd. GAWSA and SwemKids collaborated to organize a significant event at the Milam Park Pool Center in Atlanta, contributing to one of the World’s Largest Swimming Lesson gatherings. Our collective efforts during that summer made a positive impact. It’s important to recognize that learning to swim, along with the essential water safety skills and messages conveyed through swimming lessons, establishes a lifelong foundation for preventing drownings.

WLSL key message points

Research showed that the risk of drowning could be reduced by 88% if children participated in formal swimming lessons between ages 1-4.
The World’s Largest Swimming Lesson™ brought together tens of thousands of individuals from hundreds of communities around the globe who all participated in the same lesson on June 22nd to raise awareness about drowning and the importance of swimming as a vital life-saving skill that every child should learn.
In 2022, TEAM WLSL™ continued its global efforts to share the message that Swimming Lessons Save Lives! Hundreds of thousands of kids and adults got Back on Deck to host World’s Largest Swimming Lesson events, contributing to the spread of important swimming and water safety messages through social media engagement. We were proud of the efforts of all who joined us for our 13th event to prevent the loss of life through drowning.
Internationally, the World Health Organization estimated that drowning was one of the top five causes of death for people ages 1-14 in 48 of the 85 countries it monitored around the globe. Swimming is a vital life-saving skill, and drowning is preventable!