The Founder-Director

Nell White, the founder-director of AQUATOTS Swim Program, is a pioneer in infant swim teaching. Her swim teaching career dates back to 1958 which was long before her home country, South Africa, offered any form of accreditation possibilities for swim teaching. It was not until 1970 that she could be acknowledged as an accredited swim teacher by, what was then, the Transvaal Amateur Swim Association (TASA). Even then, swim teachers were left to do their own thing. There was virtually no guidance especially in the field of infant swimming.

Nell White's career as founder-director of AQUATOTS Swim Program started with her own children 40 years ago. She was driven by a compulsive need to share with them the sense of freedom and exhilaration she experienced when in water from the time they were only a few months old. Because of her lack of knowledge, she was intuitively cautious in handling them and found herself constantly turning to nature for her answers. She let her infants lead her and proceeded to adapt their natural behaviour patterns to water shaping them into immature swimming skills. Experience led her to find that infants were potentially able to swim by the time they could walk if their swimming lessons or practice sessions were not interrupted for months on end.

However, in-door swim schools, as there are to day, were unheard of at the time. There may have been no more than three or four public indoor pools in the entire country. Swimming lessons in the early 1960s were therefore mostly confined to the warmer months of the year.

The gentle child-centred approach of Nell White remained very much 'a one man show' and virtually unknown until 1989 when it became the selected method for the swim school within Constantia Health & Racquet Club (CH&RC) the first of what was to be a chain of H&RCs throughout the country each with its own highly visible AQUATOTS Swim Program. Within the following years AQUATOTS Swim Program became the chosen in-house training course for selected certified and practising swimming instructors for swim schools within the H&RC group. By then it was the most sought after method of infant swim teaching in the country.

In 1994 AQUATOTS instructor training went public with the first public AQUATOTS Instructor Course hosted by the then Southern Transvaal Swim Coaches and Teachers Association (STSCTA). Thirty-one registered swim teachers attended the week long training session which was the first of many to follow.

AQUATOTS Swim Program has not only shown its merit for instructor training locally. Relevant sections of the AQUATOTS Swim Program Instructor Manual have been used by The Australian Council for the Teaching of Swimming and Water Safety (Austswim ) for their manual, 'Teaching Infant and Preschool Aquatics.' Swimming South Africa (SSA), following suite, adopted the toddler section of AQUATOTS Swim Program as Todswim S.A. the national accreditation course for toddler swim teaching.

AQUATOTS Swim Program can thus be seen to have developed over a period of several decades before it officially got its name in 1991. Nell White continues to develop the program within the parameters of research, science, recommendations of the AAP and the medical profession in general in pursuit of her mission to make AQUATOTS the benchmark for infant swimming.