Holiday Fund: Cultivating a love of swimming

Morning and evenings, weekdays and weekends, Mila L.-F. can be found in the swimming pool.

“Have you seen those 80-year-old people swimming? I want to be one of those,” the 17-year-old Menlo-Atherton High School senior said.

“I want to do it for myself. It’s something that I enjoy doing. It’s not like you have to do it because you are good at it, or you have to do it because it’s your future. It’s something that I choose to do,” said Mila, who requested that she be identified by her first name in this article to protect her privacy.

Her first swim lesson was in 2018 when she was 12. Raised in Honduras, she moved to the United States with her parents in 2020. But her love of swimming was almost cut short when her high school swim team membership became a financial burden to her parents. At $1,500 per trimester, the cost was too high for her mom and dad, who were working low-paid jobs and also paying for medical care for Mila’s two siblings, who have health conditions.

Enter Beyond Barriers Athletic Foundation. The Redwood City-based nonprofit organization provided Mila with a swim scholarship so she could continue with the team. Mila pays for her other expenses, like USA Swimming registration and swim meets, by working as a swim instructor to younger kids at Palo Alto Stanford Aquatics. The nonprofit has been supporting Mila for two years now.

Beyond Barriers exists to connect kids to swimming. It serves children in specific neighborhoods who come from low-income families, defined as having a household income of less than 300% of the area’s Federal Poverty Level. Beyond Barriers’ programs are located at neighborhood providers and pools.

This past year, Beyond Barriers received a $5,000 grant from the Palo Alto Weekly Holiday Fund to support its programs.

Mila is one of six Menlo-Atherton students out of 140 on the swim team who are receiving a Beyond Barriers scholarship.

Her high school coach, Bruce Smith, called Mila a dedicated member of the team.

“She is a giver,” he said. “I call her almost the outreach of our program in the sense that she makes everyone feel included. She is so dedicated to it that energy kind of spreads to everyone around her.”

These days, Mila spends two hours or more at the pool every day except Sunday.

“I really love swimming,” she said. “It’s an important part of my life right now.”

In addition to working as a swim instructor, she has also been trained as a lifeguard.

“My favorite strokes are freestyle and butterfly. I am more of a distance swimmer,” she said enthusiastically.

Mila’s coach at Palo Alto Stanford Aquatics (PASA), Jacob Allen, remembers that Mila first started swimming with PASA about three years ago. She made quite an impression on him.

“She was still pretty new to the area coming from out of the country, and then she took up swimming as a sport. We spent a lot of time working on technique,” he said.

Rain or shine, she is always there swimming doing double practices – in the morning and evening – while handling her school work, he said.

Of the Beyond Barriers scholarship, Allen said: “It’s a healthy commitment for somebody else to sponsor.”

Mila believes swimming is now part of her identity.

“I really want to keep swimming because it’s such an important part of my life. It really helps me with my mental health. It’s something that I do for myself,” she said. “And it’s also something that I can do all by myself regardless of who is there. It really helps me to destress, take some time for myself. It really helps me to unwind.”

Mila’s swim idols are Katie Ledecky, Ryan Lochte and the current Stanford swimmer Torri Huske, who is an Olympian, too.

“I met her once at Jason’s Café. She is super cool and super sweet,” she said.

Mila learned from Smith that colleges like UC Santa Cruz provide the opportunity to be on swim teams for swimmers like her.

“It was a little bit of an eye-opener for her,” Smith said.

If she makes it to Stanford University or U.C. Berkeley, she could still be on club-level, student-run, more casual teams, he added. Nothing can be ruled out at this point for Mila, who is aspiring to study computer science in college.

More information about the Palo Alto Weekly Holiday Fund, including how to contribute and a list of people who’ve already donated, can be found [PaloAltoOnline.com/holiday_fund here].