My alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has finally done it. This year’s graduating seniors are the last class required to pass a swim test to graduate. It may seem outdated and silly, but I like the swim test. It’s a unifying experience of all Carolina graduates (Mike: “Isn’t spending four years in Chapel Hill enough?”). In upstate New York, where I attended elementary school, almost every public school had an indoor pool. As part of our physical education we had several weeks of swimming each year that continued as long as P.E. was required. We learned all the strokes and how to tread water. It was virtually impossible to make it through elementary school without learning to swim. In North Carolina, almost no schools have pools. I know many adults who never learned how to swim. Every summer, several adults drown in the state of North Carolina. UNC has pools. They still require physical education. If you don’t know how to swim, they’ll teach you. And the swim test wasn’t like the service academies. It only required swimming 50 yards and then treading water for the remainder of five minutes. But now it is no more.
HT to Laura Leigh for letting me know about this sad departure and also for taking such a cool picture at Notre Dame and letting me make a header with it!