Mike Hodges
“‘Reach, throw, don’t go.’ That’s what I tell my guards in training,” Mike Hodges says. “Don’t ever try to swim after someone in trouble until you’re certified to be a lifeguard. That’s how you get a double drowning.”
Hodges, who has coached swimming for more than 30 years, would know. A double drowning is what led the muscular 65-year-old to become a swim and lifeguard instructor while attending college at Virginia Union University in the early 1980s. Until recently, Hodges was the head coach for the Richmond City Riptides, the city’s USA Swimming race team.
“I grew up in Virginia Beach. I learned how to swim in the ocean,” he says. “When I was in high school, I had two friends drown in a lake. I vowed that not only would I teach swimming, but I would teach lifeguarding when I went to college. At Union, I majored in [physical education]. I thought I knew how to swim. The first day I swam across the pool, I was put in the beginners’ class. I had a Tarzan swim — arms flailing, no proper form. I had a lot to learn.”
His coach was VUU’s Horace A. Carter III, known as “Bubba.” In addition to teaching at VUU, Carter was a lifeguard and swim instructor for Richmond city pools for over 50 years. A Black coach at a time when city pools were segregated, he became a tireless advocate for helping children learn how to swim in a safe, nurturing environment.
Carter took Hodges under his wing. After Carter retired from VUU, Hodges became the university’s swim instructor. When Carter died in 2021, he was buried in his lifeguard shirt, and Hodges and Jerrod Booker — a former lifeguard for Hodges and now the recreation services supervisor for Richmond’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities — served as pallbearers.
Although the team’s name has changed over the years, the Riptides’ history began with Richmond city manager Robert C. Bobb in the 1990s. Hodges taught Bobb’s son how to swim. “Robert Bobb brought his son in with floaters on every part of his body. The first thing I did was get those off,” Hodges says, grinning. “He learned quickly. After that, Bobb asked how kids could join the swim team, which we didn’t have at the time. Bobb decided to change that.”
Hodges and his fellow trainees at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado in 1995
Bobb allocated funds to create the Richmond Rapids and sent Hodges to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to learn how to coach competitive swimming. He also hired Jung Heng Xu, an elite swim coach.
“We had mostly Black and Asian kids on the team in the ’90s,” Hodges says. “We were seriously a minority team, and we were good. So good that, once our racers got to a certain level, they got recruited by the private swim clubs in Richmond to race for them. Many of my kids have received college swim scholarships.”
Charlie Swanson (Photo courtesy USA Swimming)
One such success is Charlie Swanson, a former Richmond racer who is now on the U.S. Olympic team and slated to swim the 100-meter breaststroke in Paris later this month; heats begin July 27.
Hodges’ love of the sport is contagious, and children are eager to please him, butterfly-stroking their way toward perfection. Although he’s officially retired, both from teaching special needs kids in city schools and from coaching the Riptides, Hodges continues to work part time at each. Drop by the Swansboro pool on a weeknight, and he’ll be there.
After swim team practice, lifeguard training begins. Hodges has led Red Cross lifeguard training for decades, certifying hundreds of teens to work in Richmond city pools. Their training costs are covered once they take a paid post.
Booker was on Hodges’ winning squad at the National Lifeguard Championships in the 2000s. He says via email, “We practiced five days a week, for two hours a day. We challenged each other to be better during drills and rescues.”
While pursuing his master’s degree, Booker saw an opening at parks and recreation and jumped on it. He credits his time in the pool as a youth with shaping his programming for the city today. “Being a parks and rec kid and being involved with the opportunities offered there influenced me the most,” he says. “Having leaders like Coach Mike seeing the best in you goes a long way. The time and interest he’s put into his swimmers over the decades sticks with you.”
A skilled youth diver himself, Booker fostered a partnership with DiveRVA last year, offering free diving lessons, and he recently had new diving boards installed at Hotchkiss and Randolph pools. He says the city is preparing to build a new splash pad outside the Calhoun Community Center as well as renovate and reopen the pool. In addition to swim team and diving, the city’s aquatic programming includes artistic swimming and aqua yoga, cycling, drumming and boxing, as well as free swim lessons at “just about all of our pools” during July and August.
As for Hodges, he’ll be at the pool training swimmers and lifeguards, helping kids as they come and go. “I encourage them to find the sport that they like best,” he says. “If they want to play football rather than swim for a season, that’s great. They can always come back. Once a Riptide, always a Riptide!”
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