Anyone from age 7 to 70, especially patrons within Citiparks' public pools.

Non-swimmers can participate too because activities happen in shallow water where adults can easily walk on the bottom of the pool.

Staged events can attract citizens to the various pools and those already present can engage, optionally, on the spot. 

In 2017, events were hosted in Pittsburgh's Hill District but also at a range of other pools from invites and repeat visits to including Greensburg Country Club, South Hills Country Club and The Edgeworth Club in Sewickley. 

Adults and kids who play other sports beyond competitive swimming, such as baseball, football, basketball, soccer and field hockey, can join in for a team-building exercise with benefits of fun, fitness and play.

Any sports teams from any sport can become interested in fun fitness and enhanced water safety. Last summer, a high school field hockey team choose to play SKWIM for its team-building exercise.

Invites to social, civic, faith-based, school-based and community-based groups would ask for team participation. Certain dates, times and locations would be available via a calendar so the groups' leaders can poll their members, consider support and opt-in for an intro play date.

Playing well with others matters. This is the essence of being a community. Teamwork, sportsmanship and integrity are values that are woven into these hyper-social activities in common-ground places.

Aquatic Jamborees and SKWIM builds water-skilled, water-smart, water-strong communities. 

The structure of teamwork and water safety training comes in the context of exciting and fun water game play. 

Topics at the Play for Change Unconference match with Aquatic Jamborees:
Transforming everyday spaces into PLAYces. We modernize existing (often older) pools with play, rather just as a cool-off and sun-tan hangout. 
Generally, the play at a swim pool (within the bulk of the time devoted to public swim) is less social, less active, and with less learning that what the Aquatic Jamborees deliver.

Breaking Cultural Barriers Through Play. We recruit, engage and energize neighborhood play groups. Aquatic Jamborees motivate visits to pools around the city and region for play dates.

Playing Across the Lifespan. The play of Aquatic Jamborees includes older and younger participants, in the same game.

Pittsburgh Collaborative and a Voice for Play. Game-time leadership emerges and cascades to organizers for future fun encounters.

Emotional IQ, social aspects, resilience and recognizing emotions in others is extremely important in playing SKWIM. Team balance, teaching, strategy, tactics are big parts of SKWIM. The tide of the game can turn. SKWIM games are fluid and we witness one game go from a score of 15-to-zero and end at a score of 20-to-19. 

We build stuff. The SKWIM lagoon uses equipment, light-weight, easy for kids to set-up and tear-down. Players and lifeguards invent courses with the disk.

We problem solve with team play.

Aquatic Jamborees appeal to the curious and calls for participation to future play dates with other visitors.

SKWIM is hands on, mind on, about learning and scaffolding. 

Play happens with kids manipulating physical objects. Fins, headbands, disks to catch and toss, and boundaries to bounce off of, stand on and go under. 

SKWIM offers dramatic play, emotion management, active engagement, balance, and serves to strengthen life skills.

Aquatic Jamborees give good materials to the kids and adults to help in their guided play for creating their own magic. A spectrum of play can flourish with SKWIM in the pool, much more than ever before.

Playful leaning needs to be intriguing, thought provoking, adventurous, discovery oriented, organized, structured, and loads of fun. Aquatic Jamborees open up opportunities for discovering new aspects of ones self and ones environment. SKWIM doess all of this in spades!

This league in Pittsburgh sets the stage as a prototype recreational league for replicating nationwide. This recreational league is the foundation for competitive leagues and school leagues, both scholastic and collegiate.

Above all, we strive to lead, teach, model, practice, promote and support the goal of playing well with others. 

Another goal is to advance participation within aquatics. 

Aquatic Jamborees are active and social whereas swimming at pools, lakes and beaches, popular summer-time activities, are often passive and private. 

The more intensive realms of play within aquatics occur within lap swimming, competitive racing and water polo. However, the appeal to those are limited. The drudgery of training, the brevity of racing and the intensity of water polo limit those activities to a select few in the overall population. Those pool activities are not joyful and playful for the masses.

Aquatic Jamborees and SKWIM provide joyful and playfull action for the masses.

People want to play in the water and enjoy games. SKWIM is more unstructured, social and discovery-based. SKWIM can become a catalyst to revolutionize aquatic destinations and inspire people to insert play into their routines both within and beyond their neighborhoods. SKWIM can make game-play at the pool one of the most popular and cherished aquatic endeavors in a community's life to higher levels of wellness, fitness, socialization and sport.

Swim pools (often within our public parks) are community investments that need to modernize so as to increase opportunities for affordable, highly interactive, fitness centered experiences that invite citizens into quality coaching and leadership roles, especially in the summer with diverse groups.

SKWIM provides safer swimming, relevant water-safety instruction and aids a community in its long-term development of lifeguards, coaching and youth-sport boosters. 

Purpose. Teamwork. Sportsmanship. Duty. 

A league and its calls to compete, contribute, coach and cheer are compelling.

The designated game-day of a league gives structure which raises confidence among individuals and families. The league play becomes a ticket to get people moving beyond their comfort zones. We want the people from the south hills to venture to the Northside and The Hill District. We want the kids in the Hill District to come to practice and build friendships so that they can venture to other parts of the city and the county, having fun, meeting new friends, seeing new locations and doubling-down on their own quest to improve and grow.

Water safety needs a much wider platform for delivering important insights. The league, with a series of Aquatic Jamborees, extends the borders and boundaries for discussing aquatic safety throughout the greater community.

This game is affordable. Most camps and pools can enjoy a summer of focused play with SKWIM for less than $100, the cost of 4 disks and some home-made headbands.

The water safety elements that include four levels of certification (R.E.D. = Response, Endurance, Distance) is already built and able to be deployed through the internet costing $0 for participants, programs and facilities.

A large collection of SKWIM fins are in Pittsburgh for on-going use fro prior investments.

Two premiere, official, island goals for SKWIM are in Pittsburgh, but an additional pair is needed. 

Furthermore, in the summer of 2019, new, light-weight, inexpensive, goals, (as well as boundary borders that create the confines of the lagoons) could be put at all outdoor city and county pools, well as at dozens of community day camps, country clubs and suburban pools with nominal charges, less than $250.

Aquatics has always been centered around racing, and growth has been slow in the last 100 years because only 1-in-25 kids prefers racing to game play. Racing is always competitive, but game play is discovery oriented. Game play tells a story, which is different in every game played -- a microcosm of life.

Game play on land, court and field has diverse and wide acceptance with popularity! 

SKWIM is way “out of the box” for aquatics, but is built on historically proven principles of mass appeal, acceptance and popular interest. It is so out of the box for aquatics because the equipment for the game is advanced and not possible 20 years ago, but today is perfect timing for the community mindset of global game play.

Meanwhile, modern sports has some dark-side elements that have evolved with a super-competitive, hyper-specialized realm where young athletes of pushy parents seeking scholarships and pro sports contracts. Since SKWIM has no professional league, that baggage is not a factor. Rather, big-league hot-shots for SKWIM are certified lifeguards.

Yes! SKWIM is planned and engineered for the whole community, not just those that can swim. SKWIM can be played and enjoyed the first day by kids that have not yet learned to swim! The game encourages you to learn to swim, but it is enjoyable and effective for non-swimmers because the disk is easy to pass on the water -- easier to use than a ball or Frisbee.

Everyone in the community that is able to enter the water independently can also independently enjoy the game. Even those needing assistance such as children under 7, or elderly, have played in mixed games and totally enjoy themselves.

Getting kids and adults water safety instruction, swim instruction and aquatic fitness can help to curb one of the top causes of accidental deaths -- drowning -- a serious public health challenge. 

SKWIM game-play is exciting to watch yet easy to play. SKWIM's lagoon and goals are flexible to various settings. SKWIM activities fit in times when the pool is open. SKWIM is affordable. SKWIM's  appeal reaches far beyond the traditional swim lessons geared mainly for children. 

Wellness, obesity prevention, and cardio-rehab benefits come with our vigorous, non-contact, low-impact game. 

Invites to groups to engage at the pool for team building can feature summer-time games among teachers, students and guardians of near-by schools.

Firefighters, police, EMS and civic groups can be called to play games with the local kids at the pool.

The outdoor pool at The Pittsburgh Project serves as a key sites within the Northside. The nonprofit network can be activated to include charter schools, faith-based groups, and service groups that visit TPP for the mission trips. The meeting facilities, cafeteria and even ample parking provide assurances for visitors to make game-day plans. 

SKWIM gives groups purpose to engage at the swim pool for something new and different.

Our partners outside the league include:

• Red Cross Lifeguards 
• Pittsburgh Public Schools swim teams
• Local YMCA swim teams
• Local districts with pools, scholastic swim and sports teams (WPIAL), and club teams 
• Pittsburgh's Masters Water Polo team
• Local high schools building water polo teams
• American Water Polo

Aquatic Jamborees gives a model that can be replicated throughout the region. Pools are often under-utilized facilities in many hours of the week throughout the summer. Most pools have a tremendous capacity for serving as play sites to a wide audience. Aquatic Jamborees can scale and cascade among swimmers, coaches, families, groups, camps and their respective facility managers.

In Pittsburgh, with schools and at parks, serious divides exist. Some are among city neighborhoods. Another divide is between urban and suburban. Pittsburgh Public School sports with its City League is notoriously isolated and the opportunities for city kids are but a fraction of what is available with programs in the WPIAL.

Nationally, tremendous gaps loom large in terms of recreational opportunities between the affluent and the urban poor.

This venture of Aquatic Jamborees builds bridges: both within the city and beyond its borders. First we play among neighborhoods within the city. Pittsburgh Citiparks has an organized aquatic staff with more than a dozen pools where events can begin and players can form pick-up games. Then cross-town games can be organized with visitors. The last link is the most exciting bridge as we witness sponsored, organized, play among suburban country club pools and city rec centers. This pathway of play, fun, kids, adults, teamwork, sportsmanship in the soothing waters with some directed supervision and SKWIM disks makes a formula that can energize and motivate. 

These efforts can scale in 2019 because of work and credibility from past years, the simplicity of play and SKWIM, and the authentic story we can deliver. 

Pittsburgh is a sports town with a rich legacy of water -- from its rivers to its swimming pools. Skills of playing well with others in our physical spaces needs its due attention.