[JackCh]

Relatively few people who've not been on a competitive team have ever taken enough swimming lessons to be good for a few brisk laps of the pool. Where I come from every school child gets probably 20 hours or so of swim lessons in public school, spread out over several years. In my experience this sort of background is typically enough to be able to tread water and move around, but not with correct form. And without correct form they will quickly fatigue.

It's certainly possible for a autodidact swimmer with such a background to go to the Y pool and start doing laps until they figure out out on their own, but that's pretty uncommon. And it's also possible for somebody to pay for enough private lessons to become a competent swimmer, but that's also fairly uncommon. In my experience every licensed lifeguard I've ever met was currently or formerly a competitive swimmer; that's not a requirement but realistically only competitive swimmers could accomplish the 300 yard perquisite swim required to qualify you to receive training. (As for selection bias, in my training course there were several without competitive swimming backgrounds who tried, but failed.)

(In some outlying situations, perhaps such as a coastal community where surfing is common, the above might not necessarily be true. But for your typical community I'd say it's a good bet that anybody who hasn't swam competitively will, if they're able to swim at all, have poor form and fatigue quickly.)

[whatsstolat]

This sounds absymal. Is this the US? Definitely different in Australia and UK.

Maybe there are more pools here.

I used to swim 1k couple of times a week (no breaks) just to "keep fit" not even competitive. I considered that normal.

[JackCh]

Yes this is in the US. The school district owned one pool. A few years of your 12 years in the school district system, students would get a week or two of lessons during gym class (being bused to the pool from the other schools in the district, when necessary.) About an hour of lessons 2-3 times a week for one or two weeks, a handful of times in twelve years. On second thought 20 hours may have been an underestimate, but not by much.

That same pool is also where private swimming lessons for all ages were available for a modest fee (that program was subsidized by the pool's existence but otherwise self-funding. I worked as an instructor in that program for a few years and got a modest paycheck for it.) That pool was also use for practice and meets for the swim club (competitive swimming for young children) and the swim team (competitive swimming for teenagers.) Private lessons were mostly attended by young children, their parents stopped paying for it once they were reasonably confident their child wouldn't drown and it was very rare for anybody as old as a teenager to take those lessons. The pool was also open to the public once or twice a week for a dollar or two and there was a lane set aside for lap swimming, but it was rarely used.

I'm not sure what the bottleneck was that prevented more school-hour swimming lessons during their scheduled gym classes. It may have been the busing requirement, since there were a handful of elementary schools in the district that were not close to the school building that had the pool.

[adrianratnapala]

While I agree it is better in the Australia, it can't be that uncommon. I am Australian but would struggle to swim 100m.

I have always been a pretty poor swimmer by local standards. But that is not because others did any more lessons in school than I did (those lessons were quite limited).

Some might have had more private lessons than me; but I think the main difference is that they bedded down what they had learned in lessons doing recreational swimming. Which I is common in Australia, but rare where my family comes from.