Went to Make-a-Splash with Cullen Jones in LA Today!

Me with Cullen Jones

This morning I made my way out to a Make-a-Splash event featuring Olympic Gold Medalist Cullen Jones in downtown LA. I was pretty excited to go see Cullen talk, and I'm a fan of the work he's doing to help kids learn to swim. I was scared to death of water until I was like 11 years old and had a few aquatic close calls growing up. If it weren't for my mom making sure I took swim lessons every summer I wouldn't be water safe, and I would have never started swimming competitively. Make-a-Splash is in place to help kids who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to learn how to swim get the opportunity to do so and become safe in the water.

Amazingly I got a seat at the cool kids table. I had Mel Stewart, Chris LaBianco, and Rowdy Gaines to the left of me and John Naber to the right of me. I had a ton of fun joking around with Gold Medal Mel and listening to the speakers they had for us this morning.

We heard from a few different people involved with the Make-a-Splash program and they all did a really good job of driving home the point that a drowning death is a highly preventable death. All it requires is an opportunity for a child to get in a pool with an instructor focused on getting them water safe. To learn more about what Make-a-Splash does you can go to makeasplash.org or if you want to make a donation to support the cause you can do that over here.

After the official portion of the event was over I got to mix around, mingle a little bit, and get some pictures. Random fun fact of the day... upwards of 3 different gold medalists have now taken pictures with my iPhone :) It was very cool to get to talk at length with Mel, Rowdy, Steve from 10kswimmer, and a lot of the people that work with the USA Swimming Foundation and Make-a-Splash.


Cullen talking about the Make-a-Splash program

We Had 6 Olympians in attendance, 5 of them swimmers (Lenny Krayzelburg, John Naber, Cullen Jones, Mel Stewart, and Rowdy Gaines)

Me and Rowdy, photo by Gold Medal Mel

Me and Gold Medal Mel, photo by John Naber