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The three-year swim club : the untold story of Maui's sugar ditch kids and their quest for Olympic glory / Julie Checkoway
Edited by Grand Central Publishing - 2015
The inspirational story of a group of impoverished children who were transformed into champion swimmers. In 1937, an ordinary grammar school teacher on the island of Maui took a group of under privileged children, most of Japanese ancestry, and trained them to become Olympic swimmers. He called his plan the "Three-Year Swim Club," and he succeeded in producing true American heroes whose story has never been told. None of the barefoot children had ever laid eyes on a pool; their only experience in water was playing naked in the filthy irrigation ditches that snaked down from the mountains and into the sugar cane fields. And the coach knew nothing about coaching and couldn't swim a lap to save his life. But, against all odds, and during a period of US history marked by virulent racism against a backdrop of a second global war, the boys embarked on an unlikely path that that led them to become celebrated swimmers and real-life American heroes.