Alumni Profile: Trish P. Miller

For years, Rollins alumna Trish Miller thought water was the barrier that kept her from swimming. It was much deeper than that. “My parents grew up in the Jim Crow era,” Miller says. It was a time when all aspects of public life were segregated, from schools to beaches and swimming pools. While legal segregation had ended by the time Miller grew up, it left a mark on the Black community. Her parents felt that beaches and pools—even nearby Virginia Beach—were “not for us." 

Because of this legacy, her family simply didn’t swim. The closest they came was fishing—in particular, the time when her father taught her brothers to swim by pushing them off a fishing boat in the middle of a lake. As a result, like many other Black children, Miller never learned to swim.

For several years, this wasn’t a problem—until it became a life-threatening one. During her sophomore year of college, Miller took a spring break trip to Florida with some girlfriends. While spending time by the resort pool, Miller’s friends offered to teach her how to swim. They showed her some strokes, and the scissor kicks and wide arm-circles of freestyle. But they forgot some of the basics.

“They didn’t teach me how to tread water, how to float, or really any of the things that are critical to actually knowing how to swim,” Miller remembers.

When the inexperienced teen jumped into the deep end, she quickly realized the error.

“I didn’t know how to tread, so I ended up going right under. And then the panic set in. I gulped water…and it was over from there.”

Her friends managed to drag her to safety, but Miller was traumatized. She stayed away from the water for the next 20 years.

A Rollins Project Sets a Dream in Motion

Years later, as a behavioral sciences and health education student at Rollins, one of Miller’s professors challenged the students to tackle a public health issue that had directly affected them. Miller’s thoughts returned to those terrifying seconds when she sunk in the pool. 

Miller’s preliminary research revealed that her story was not unique. Drowning rates are 1.5 times higher for Black adults than those of white adults, and children experience even wider disparities. Black children ages 10–14 are 7.6 times more likely than white children to drown in swimming pools. Miller wondered whether affordable swimming lessons, taught by instructors who shared the students’ backgrounds, would make a difference.

After Miller graduated, she decided to test her theory. She applied for—and won—a business pitch contest with the Center for Civic Innovation. The Atlanta-based center helped her launch a nonprofit swimming organization called SwemSchool, which, at that time, only partnered with schools to transport students to local pools and provide swimming lessons (now the organization offers swimming lessons for both children and adults). 

While SwemSchool is tuition-based, Miller also made sure to set up a scholarship program, SwemKids. SwemKids provides four 45-minute swimming lessons at a subsidized cost and a resource bag that includes a bathing suit, swim cap, goggles, and hair and skin care products.

A Renewed Relationship with Water

But as Miller was teaching other people to overcome their fear of the water, she realized she still had her own to confront. After a series of unhelpful lessons, she finally found an instructor who approached swimming differently: “He helped me to see that water was not for me to control. She compares learning to swim with courting a partner. “It becomes something that you spend time with…you get to know each other's boundaries, you build trust, then you celebrate things together. It was like a dance that I was experiencing with the water.”

That year, with her instructor cheering from the sidelines, she completed her first 25-meter lap.

Looking Ahead

It’s been nine years, and SwemSchool is still swimming strong. Miller just purchased the program’s first facility, a 14,000 square-foot building in Conyers, Georgia. While the flagship location will boast two indoor pools, SwemSchool will still offer lessons at local pools in underserved communities. Meanwhile, Miller is expanding the business with a patented new swim cap designed for thicker, curlier hair.

Looking back, Miller is proud of how far she’s come. She thanks her Emory experience for giving her the tools she needed to take the dive. “Rollins really was at the core of the work that I do now. It allowed me to look beyond the traditional paths of public health and really turn it into something that was very personal for me.”

Trish Miller is no longer fighting the current. Instead, she’s letting it carry her forward.