America's favorite summer pastime is dying

I spent my summer afternoons as a tween at my local public pool in Milwaukee with a gaggle of neighborhood kids. I was there for Marco Polo, water tag, and proudly modeling the matching purple nose plugs and goggles that I'd bought with my allowance. My girlfriends, a year or two older, were most interested in catching the eye of the male lifeguards.

I would gamely follow along as they made conversation with our tanned and fit overseers. The teenage and 20-something guards held celebrity status in our eyes. And, as far as I can remember, they were reasonably good sports about getting pestered by a bunch of hormonally charged grade schoolers. By the time school started back up at the end of August, my dark-brown hair would be tinged with orange, proudly earned proof of my participation in the storied summer tradition of chlorine and sun.

Too many kids growing up in America today, however, won't know what any of that was like — the lifeguard is now on life support. The American Lifeguard Association reported last year that one-third of the country's 309,000 public swimming pools would either close for the summer season or operate in a limited capacity, marking the third year in a row for dramatically reduced pool access nationwide. My childhood pool — where my grandfather worked as a locker-room attendant in the 1940s and my dad learned to swim in the 1960s — has been closed to the public since 2020. Public beaches share the struggle.

This year, the predicament continues. Some cities have turned to creative measures such as recruiting and training retirees for seasonal positions or lowering age requirements for certification. In many cases, it hasn't been enough.

Once an emblem of summer — and the object of poolside fawning — the American lifeguard has somehow become an endangered species.

The national lifeguard crisis isn't entirely unprecedented: Intermittent shortages have befallen the nation's pools and beaches since at least the '20s. But my peak pool patronage took place in the late '90s, which happened to coincide with an unusually long stretch of high lifeguard recruitment and retention. And somehow this was happening at a time when many US cities were prioritizing public spending on law enforcement at the expense of other public services, including recreational amenities such as parks and pools.

What brought on this age of lifeguard plenty? Cue the opening montage to "Baywatch."

The popular syndicated TV series, which centered on a crew of impossibly good-looking Southern California lifeguards saving lives and breaking hearts in high-cut, tomato-red swimsuits, aired from 1989 to 2001. "It showed lifeguarding as a glamorous lifestyle and made it look like a great profession," Wyatt Werneth, a spokesperson for the American Lifeguard Association, said. Werneth became a professional lifeguard in the early '90s — aka peak "Baywatch" — and told me that the show had a direct impact on the public's perception of his industry: "It was prestigious. You wore your lifeguard uniform with pride."

The people I spoke with who lifeguarded in their teens and 20s remembered it fondly. "I enjoyed lifeguarding because it was what I considered a 'professional job,'" said Jessi Adler, who lifeguarded at various pools throughout her high-school and college years in Michigan between 1995 and 2003. "While many of my friends were working at a fast-food joint, I had learned a real skill and was responsible for people's lives."

Now a public-relations director in Central Texas, Adler and her husband were recently volunteering as tour guides and maintenance workers at Lyndon B. Johnson State Park when park officials offered to pay for her lifeguard recertification so she could pitch in with an occasional pool shift. The request was deferred because of pool renovations, but the need hasn't gone away: The park issued a plea for lifeguard applicants on its community Facebook page in early June.

The scenario presents a sharp departure from Adler's youth, when lifeguarding seemed like the ultimate summer job. "I remember being so excited when I was old enough to be eligible to take the certification test," she said.

Most lifeguards in the US are under the age of 25. Jason Russell, a professor of history and labor studies at SUNY Empire State, told me that the idea of lifeguarding as a young person's job keeps it from becoming professionalized — which makes it more prone to ebbs and flows. Instead of a career with long-term advancement opportunities that's compensated accordingly, it's seen as entry-level service work for kids. This poses a variety of staffing challenges. In beach-resort communities, for example, there's often a lack of nearby housing available to low-wage seasonal workers who may or may not have the means of getting to work from more-affordable accommodations further afield.

"On 'Baywatch,' they never had any problems finding places to live," Russell said. "They were driving around in cars. The material circumstances of their lives were much different than the average actual lifeguard."

Despite its glossy portrayal of the job, the "Baywatch" effect could only last so long. By the 2010s, lifeguard shortages had resurfaced as a widespread concern. When the pandemic came along, the predicament ratcheted up to a full-blown crisis.

Werneth told me that when pools shut down in 2020, prospective lifeguarding recruits missed out on training and certification opportunities and found work elsewhere. Others say the shortages stem from an increased demand for lifeguards at commercial aquatic facilities — waterparks have grown by nearly 50% in the US and Canada since 2014, according to the World Waterpark Association, a global trade group. But those explanations ignore the fact that a lot of Americans simply can't swim; according to the American Red Cross, more than half of Americans either can't swim at all or lack the basic water skills to swim safely. That's a startling plummet from the 93% of men and 74% of women who said they knew how to swim in a 1991 survey published by the American Journal of Public Health. Fewer swimmers means fewer prospective lifeguards. And this problem feeds on itself: A lot of Americans can't swim because of poor access to public swimming facilities and lessons, and those training opportunities get harder to find thanks to the shortage of qualified lifeguards.

The crisis is a stark contrast to our nation's past when swimming was seen as a beloved pastime. In his 2007 book, "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America," Jeff Wiltse cited a 1933 survey that found that many Americans prized swimming in public pools as much as going to the movies. "Pools became emblems of a new, distinctly modern version of the good life that valued leisure, pleasure, and beauty," Wiltse wrote. "They were, in short, an integral part of the kind of life Americans wanted to live." Between 1933 and 1938, some 750 public pools were constructed under the New Deal. The art-deco splendor of some surviving pools of this era such as the grand Astoria Park pool in New York City, serve as poignant reminders of this public-swimming heyday.

But the romance did not last. As white Americans moved to the suburbs in the middle of the 20th century, public pools began their long and steady decline. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, many cities opted to close public swimming facilities instead of complying with desegregation mandates, which sharply reduced access to swimming lessons. Suburbanites, meanwhile, preferred the privacy of backyard pools and private clubs. By the second half of the 20th century, a person's race, socioeconomic status, and whether they lived in a city or suburb became key predictors of their ability to swim. That pattern persists to this day, narrowing the pool of prospective lifeguards to draw from.

The swim disparities also influenced the scope of a lifeguard's job. My younger brother, who worked as a lifeguard at several Milwaukee city pools in the late 2000s and early 2010s, recalled having to make numerous rescues at one particularly high-traffic pool and waterpark. Adler, meanwhile, recounted her rescues in suburban Michigan as "very minimal and never serious." (Though she did notice that people's swimming skills were more of a mixed bag at her college pool, where patrons came from a variety of backgrounds, than at her community's country club and high school.)

"There's a problem, period, with a decline in swimming lessons," Russell, the labor historian, told me, adding that the inability to swim was more pronounced in communities of color because of a legacy of segregation and diminishing access to public facilities. While the lack of qualified lifeguards may partly stem from this problem, getting more lifeguards on stands could turn things around.

Russell has some ideas. "As a labor academic, I tend to think that paying more money helps," he told me. "Employers lament, 'Nobody wants to work.' But there is a solution: Pay more money." In fact, wage bumps have already helped curb lifeguard shortages in several US cities, including Chicago, Denver, Baltimore, and San Antonio.

As we enter our fourth year without enough lifeguards, it's hard to imagine them retaking the podium as the cultural idol of American summer. Even Hollywood's 2017 "Baywatch" revival film couldn't respark a love affair with the red suit. But while times and tastes may change, the attributes that make a summer job worthwhile stay more or less the same. When more cities prioritize safe water access for the masses — and pay lifeguards accordingly — the mighty lifeguard just may rise again.

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.