In the Swim

A Lifetime of Lessons with Phoebe Natina…

Phoebe Natina has been teaching Redding-area children to swim for more than 50 years. Her method is simple. Her record is extraordinary. And she has no plans to stop.

Phoebe Natina began teaching swimming at 17. She is still at it. In the decades since, she has taught thousands of children and adults to feel at home in the water and has raised nine children — nearly all of them swimmers, several of them coaches. She has also become something of a legend in the Redding community.

Ask her when she plans to retire, and she doesn’t hesitate. “I’ll probably die in the pool,” she says.

That’s not bravado. It’s just Phoebe. She has been swimming since childhood, learned to teach from swim instructor Carl Eddington — whose niece was her best friend and with whom she grew up like family — and has spent the better part of six decades refining a method
she believes anyone can learn. Not just children. Not just strong
athletes. Anyone.

“There are never too many swimming teachers or swimming programs,” she says. “It is a matter of life or death. Not everybody needs to learn to play the piano. Not everybody needs to ride a horse or play tennis. But they all need to learn to read, ride a bike and swim.”

At the center of Phoebe’s teaching is a technique  called the vertical float — a drown-proofing method developed by Eddington, whose original drawings Phoebe still has. The approach is deceptively simple: rather than teaching strokes first, it teaches breathing. Take a breath, go under, relax, float, come back up, exhale. Repeat.

“I tell my students: you don’t have to know how to swim. You just need to know how to breathe,” Phoebe says. “This method teaches people to breathe more than it teaches them to swim.”

The vertical float is effective, she explains, because it works with the body rather than against it. Children naturally enter the water feet-first and come up head-first. The method builds on that instinct. In an emergency, a person who knows only the vertical float can survive in open water for hours. It is not a trick. It is a foundation.

Phoebe teaches it to babies as young as two or three months old, to adults who never learned it as children, to blind and deaf students, and to people with severe disabilities. 

Technique, though, comes second. Before any child goes near the water, Phoebe teaches something harder: trust. “Building trust with students is critical,” she says. “For me, it usually takes about three days with children.” 

She is direct about what she expects in return. Phoebe cites Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen Keller: “Obedience is the gateway through which knowledge enters the mind of a child.” If a student tells her she’s not the boss of them, she corrects it immediately. “When you are taking lessons from me,” she says, “I am the boss.” She describes herself as old-school on this point and is unapologetic about it. In her experience, children who listen learn. Children who don’t, don’t.

What that firmness coexists with — and what parents who seek her out, recognize — is patience and genuine warmth. “The world is mostly water,” she tells her students. “You want to be good at it. Not just OK.”

Phoebe and her husband, Mike, have nine children. Swimming didn’t stop at the pool’s edge — it ran through the household and out the other side. Her son is a U.S. swim coach whose athletes include national- and Olympic-level competitors. One daughter runs a swim school in Austin, Texas, with her husband, also a coach. In Redding, two of her daughters have built a business that teaches Phoebe’s methods to a new generation.

Swim Foundations was founded by her daughter, Nina Natina, who grew up watching her mother work and later formalized that knowledge into a teaching curriculum. Last year, daughter Margaret purchased the business from Nina and took over day-to-day operations. Margaret grew up with many interests, but she always came back to swimming. For the past decade, as a single mom, she has found it dependable work, and she is still passionate about it.

“We are proud to carry forward the methods we learned from our mom and to share them more broadly with our community,” Margaret says.

The business is a hands-on one. Margaret prefers being in the pool to managing from the sidelines. She is expecting a baby this summer, which means she will be out of the water for a season — something she admits will give her serious FOMO. In the meantime, demand for Swim Foundations lessons has outpaced the number of available teachers. “We don’t even have enough teachers to teach everyone who’s coming in,” she says.

The next generation is already circling the pool deck. Margaret’s teenage daughter has worked with Phoebe over the years and may soon begin teaching lessons of her own. “It’s still moving through the generations,” Margaret says. “From my mom to her daughters, and now to granddaughters and nieces.”

People regularly ask Phoebe when she is going to quit. She has heard it for years. Her answer has not changed. She will keep teaching as long as she is able. The water, she says, is creation. It is intelligence. “Water is God on Earth.”

She was 17 when she had her first child and carried her to the pool, playing with her until, at nine months old, the baby swam on her own. That child grew up. More children came. They swam. They taught. Now their children swim, too.

There is a line that runs from Eddington’s original drown-proofing drawings — which Phoebe still keeps — through decades of lessons in Redding, through nine children and 20 grandchildren, and out into pools across the country where Natinas are still teaching people how to breathe. Phoebe Natina is the beginning of that line. 

She is still very much in the middle of it. •

Swim Foundations • www.swimfoundations.com

Phoebe Natina  By the numbers

•50+ years of swim instruction
•40+ years as a competitive swim coach
•Redding Swim Team member, 1958–1968; later served as its coach
•9 children, nearly all swimmers — several competing at the national level
•20 grandchildren, 4 great-grandchildren

Article Written by:
Al Olson loves culinary arts, adult beverages and hiking in the North State wilderness. You may find him soaking up the scenery at one of our area’s many state or national parks or sitting in a barstool sipping a cold locally brewed craft beer.