Our Story

By Katrice Rodrigues - Founder of Afro Aquatics

I have always loved swimming ever since I could remember. My parents put me in swimming lessons and I learnt to swim at around age 5 at the Hinckley Leisure Centre and was told that my first swimming badge was 100m as I just kept going after 1 length to do 4.

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I started swimming for a local swimming club Leicester Penguin's age 8 and still remember my first swimming gala when I won the 1-length butterfly and managed to finish teeth first. I was swimming around 3 times a week training twice and representing my club most Saturday afternoons at pools all over the Midlands and North of the UK. 

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At age 14, I started to coach and became team manager of the girls’ team of 7-12 year-olds, and continued to swim for my club at the time, Leicester Neptune swimming club, as we had moved to the Leicester City area. I do not remember seeing any other swimmers from an Afro-Caribbean background apart from me and my brother. There were a couple of Indian families but that was it no more brown faces. 

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My club paid for me to do my Assistant Swim Teachers qualification as soon as I was 16 and I started to teach part-time alongside my studies at college, for Leicester City Council. When I started teaching swimming and lifeguarding around the various pools in Leicester, again I did not see many black faces teaching or as lifeguards. Definitely not in proportion to the population of the African and Caribbean communities of Leicester. 

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I also worked part-time as a swimming teacher when I moved to Wolverhampton to attend University. It was also a similar story with the lack of black representation amongst my colleagues when I worked for Wolverhampton City Council and Dudley Borough Council. 

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I continued to teach swimming part-time until 2007 when I qualified as a Secondary School Art and Design Teacher. I did not stay away from swimming for long, because in 2014 I qualified as a Level 2 Swim Teacher and started to teach for Penguins Swim Academy who swim at Leicester Grammar School pool and still work there now. In 2012, I was lucky enough to be a games maker at the Aquatics Centre during the London 2012 Olympics.

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In 2019 I decided to combine my love of teaching with my passion for swimming and became a Swim England Tutor, where I now deliver Swim Teacher courses. It has been a steep learning curve, I have learnt so much, but I loved working with adults and inspiring them to be the next generation of teachers. Being a dyslexic learner and having to adapt to working online through the pandemic has not been easy, but I just love being involved in the Aquatics world. 

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I had wanted to set up Afro Aquatics for some time to address the negativity around swimming associated with the black community. So here we are, I have got a group of committed directors who also believe in our vision of getting more black people swimming regularly and working in aquatics.

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Afro Aquatics needs supporters like you to share our story, support our vision and help to get members to join our adult's weekly Swim Tuition, 1-1 classes  and swim regularly.