Hello

Let my mother tell it, I was swimming before I could walk. The story goes that my father was teaching a swimming class at a YMCA in Roanoke Rapids, NC and I crawled in the pool behind him and if you know my father, he said "If you are big enough to follow then you better be big enough to keep up". And so the story goes I have been swimming ever since. I have numerous stories around swimming, from being the youngest pool manager for City of Jacksonville Recreation Department to using swimming during the Summer to keep in shape for other sports. Teaching kids to swim has been a great joy, watching a person go from being scared of the water to building their confidence to jump off the diving board and swim to the side of the pool, is something words can't explain. Swimming has done so many things for me; keeping me out of trouble, providing money for school by working as a lifeguard during the Summer, building my confidence by meeting new people, and keeping me in shape, just to name a few things. 

My father taught me how to fish, and for that I could never repay him for all the lesson I have learned by fishing. The proverb ' Give a Man a fish you feed him for a day, Teach a Man to fish you feed him for a life time'. Fishing has taught me so many lessons of life, one big one is patience. I want to give this knowledge of fishing back to the future, for the future to pay it forward.