Kate Connell has dedicated the past few years to speaking about and creating educational content aimed at helping the aquatics industry improve equity, inclusion, access, and staff training. Between webinars, national trade shows, and other opportunities, she has spoken at more than 100 sessions on different topics as they relate to equity and aquatics.
Connell continues to have important conversations about how to make people of all backgrounds, identities, and abilities feel comfortable when they visit a municipal pool, guarded beach, or aquatics facility. Her work has also shaped efforts at the association level.
DRIVING CHANGE
Before working in aquatics, Connell was a yoga teacher with her own studio, where accessibility and
inclusion were already central to her practice and values. Coming from that space helped her recognize sensitivity training gaps in aquatics. Practitioners like her who worked in the field didn’t have the training or expertise to handle different situations with the proper sensitivity.
During the early days of the pandemic, when her work at a municipal aquatics department paused,
Connell used her extra time as an opportunity to make educational materials. She created social media content, guest articles, webinars – and later live training sessions – through different organizations.
Her content focused on inclusion in general and touched on a variety of topics. “During the first year, my signature training centered on the Three Ps: personnel, policies, and programs,” Connell says. This work became the foundation of Equitable Aquatics, an education and training initiative she launched in 2020 to help aquatics professionals and organizations build more inclusive environments using policies, programming, and staff training.
As time went on, she added other topics that professionals identified as urgent, including de-escalation, empathy, inclusive leadership, difficult conversations, inclusive first aid, inclusive language, and more.
In addition, Connell has played a key role in shaping equity efforts at the association level. She is a founding member and current chair of the AOAP Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Subcommittee. Through her work with AOAP, she has been able to help bring more attention to DEI in the industry.
“We launched a dedicated Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice track for the 2026 International Aquatics & Water Safety Conference and Exposition,” she says. “We also strengthened the Aquatic Professional Designation (AqP) by requiring all candidates to complete training in DEIJ topics.”
In promoting and teaching about inclusion, Connell encourages all facility managers to review their rules and policies. These can largely determine how welcoming it is to all groups. Examine every rule and policy, she encourages, and really ask why it is necessary. If a policy can’t be explained, she recommends going back to the drawing board to figure out what the goal is in making the rule. While perhaps unintended, unnecessary rules and policies can exclude certain groups.
LOOKING AHEAD
While Connell is proud of her work, she acknowledges that more is to be done. There is still discomfort for some around the term diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.
“I’m a white person, so I generally have more capacity to be able to try to work with people who have that sentiment,” she says.
In presentations, she aims to meet people where they are and use language that helps them understand why these concepts and practices are important.
In the future, she hopes to see more inclusion and integration of all types of learners into different swim lessons rather than creating separate lessons. She also wants to give aquatics facilities tools to assess their level of inclusion.
