Veteran swim teacher gives holiday lessons in Whanganui

Tod Sollitt has been teaching a class of about 15 at the Whanganui Intermediate School pool this summer. Photo / Lewis Gardner

After more than 50 years it still gives Tod Sollitt a thrill to watch children progress in their swimming.

For the past three weeks he's been giving one-hour classes every weekday to about 15 children from six families at the Whanganui Intermediate School pool. The children range in age from 5 to 17, and most are from Society of St Pius X families and go to schools without pools.

The parents pay "Toddy" Sollitt for the lessons, and he has permission to use the solar-heated pool at the school. He's been teaching and coaching swimming since the late 1960s - and not on a voluntary basis.

"I refuse to do it for nothing nowadays. With people paying, they make sure their kids are here," he said.

Aged 82, he has other reasons for carrying on teaching.

"I do this because I love it. It keeps me young. It keeps your mind ticking."

It also means a lot of people greet him when he's out and about around town.

There's not enough learn-to-swim teaching available, he said, and many schools don't have pools.

"People can go to the Splash Centre, but the costs are just too great for them."

He's not a "bully coach" like some people, and prefers to encourage children. Last year a group of Catholic children asked him to go to Mass with them. He's not Catholic, but he went.

"They fell all over me at church, they were so rapt," he said.

One grateful parent this summer is Antonia Gregory. She has nine children and Sollitt taught her eldest to swim when he worked at Whanganui East Pool.

Over the past three weeks she's watched a child who was a borderline swimmer make fantastic progress.

"The little ones have gone from being scared of the water to floating and putting their faces in."

One boy, 13-year-old Francis Gregory, told Sollitt he wants to be coached for competitive swimming.

It's sometimes cold taking the lessons, but it's worth it, he said.

"It's good doing hard work and feeling it after."

When this summer's classes are finished Sollitt will coach even more children - but after school.

"There's always a call for it. It seems to get worse when school restarts," he said.

Sollitt became a competitive swimmer himself, in 1952. In the late 1960s he started coaching, at Pukekohe.

When he returned to Whanganui in 1979 he went back to his old club in Whanganui East. Until about five years ago he managed and taught at the Whanganui East Pool.