Portales club sponsors free community swim

Area families will have the opportunity to enjoy a day of swimming at no cost to them on Thursday.

The second annual free swim day, sponsored by the Portales Kiwanis Club, will be held from 1 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. Thursday at the Portales City Pool as “something to give back to the community,” according to Anthony Schroeder, a member of the Kiwanis Club.

File photo

The second annual free swim day will take place from 1 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. Thursday at the Portales City Pool. The free swim day is sponsored by the Portales Kiwanis Club and is open to the public.

The free swim day, Schroeder said, came about after the Kiwanis Club had been holding swim meets for “somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 or more years.”

“We do the swim meet every year, and I guess about three or four years ago, someone said, ‘Why don’t we do an open afternoon for anyone in the community?’ That’s sort of where it started, with people suggesting we do that,” he said.

According to Schroeder, the free swim day helps to strengthen the bond between families by “getting parents and kids together to participate in a single activity.”

“The purpose of Kiwanis is helping children, and we really work at the idea of ‘one child at a time.’ This is really designed not so much for the adults, but it is for the kids to have the parents go to the swimming pool with them and to get in and maybe demonstrate their ability to swim,” he said.

Schroeder said that he expects a good turnout at the event, a statement echoed by Kiwanis Secretary Dorothy Glover.

According to Glover, the free swim day affords children the opportunity to swim, something that many children normally wouldn’t be able to do.

“There’s lots of kids that are on low income that don’t even get to come swimming period. Also, this is a nice thing to do, and it brings families together, because the children tell their parents, and their parents might know of somebody else. It’s good for the community; it’s good for the kids,” she said. “Children, they like the attention. They might not get the ribbons that they do at the swim meet, but they like their parents to be there.”