GREENSBURG, Pa. (AP) - For more than half of her 92 years, Betty Prycl has taught young people to swim and instructed teens and adults on how to teach others to swim.
“I was always a good swimmer, but I didn’t know how to teach, so I learned just by doing it,” said Prycl of Hempfield.
Prycl finally took the time to put her teaching methods and keys to successful swimming instruction on paper by collaborating with fellow instructor Jim Merckle to publish a short book titled “Learn To Swim an Easy Way.”
“I basically picked Betty’s brain,” said Merckle, a Red Cross water safety instructor trainer who trained under Prycl. “My objective there was this: She had talked on several occasions on how everybody wanted her to write a book, and I wanted to have her write down what I think are her keys to making these swimming things work.”
Prycl and Merckle wanted the book to be intuitive and easy understand, just like Prycl’s swimming classes had been.
“It’s the key that makes something work. It takes out all the other stuff,” Prycl said. “If you don’t really know what you’re saying, they don’t know what you’re saying, either. It had to be easy in order for people to learn.”
Prycl spent lots of time swimming as a youngster growing up in Pittsburgh’s Troy Hill neighborhood, even though formal swimming classes weren’t prevalent.
“I said to the lifeguard … ’Would you teach me how to swim?’ I must have been about 6,” she recalled. “He said, ’Sure, hold on to the gutter with your two hands and kick your feet.’ I did that until I got tired, and I said ’Well, what do I do next?’ He said ’Put your toes in the gutter and make your arms move,’ so I did that, and he said ’Now, swim.’ What I did, I have no idea, but I did learn how to swim.
“It was no lesson. No one was there saying, ’Do this, do that.’ … It was a free-for-all; everybody was doing what they wanted,” she said.
Prycl swam frequently at the Sarah Heinz House, and was a competitive swimmer into her late 80s. In 2007, she set a National Senior Games record for the women’s 85-89 age group in the 200 breaststroke. She ranks in the top 10 nationally for her age group in several other swimming events.
Prycl spent 46 years teaching swimming, primarily in conjunction with Hempfield Parks and Recreation and later the Penn-Trafford Area Recreation Commission. She taught at the aquatics schools at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh.
“We would take 30 kids at a time,” Prycl said of her classes. “As they got a little further along, they, of course, may not want to swim; they might want to play baseball or football. But our classes were always full.”
Those full classes helped Prycl find adults interested in learning how to teach swimming, including Merckle.
“My granddaughter Melanie, at about 5 or 6, started to take lessons from Betty. At that time, Hempfield Rec was sponsoring it, and it was at Seton Hill University. I went up there and was watching Betty teach, and that got me excited, because I had never seen it done the way Betty was doing it,” Merckle said.
“I was a college swimmer. When I was younger, I was a water safety instructor and a lifeguard. When they taught water safety instruction in the old days, they basically checked your swimming skills and didn’t tell you how to teach it.
“Betty was the person that taught me how to teach it,” he said. “I got involved with her because I liked her program, and she got me recertified. I’ve taught now for the last 11 or 12 years as a retiree.”
“We’ve had such wonderful comments about (the book), I’m sorry I didn’t write it sooner,” Prycl said. “I’ve been doing everything that’s in that book, basically. … It just worked.”
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Information from: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, https://pghtrib.com
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