The United States, you may have heard, is in a lifeguard shortage. The city of Houston is offering new lifeguards a $500 bonus. Jackson, Mississippi, is raising lifeguard pay by more than 40 percent. Colorado is “stepping up” with $250,000 for hiring lifeguard reinforcements; in the meantime, senior citizens are filling in. According to the American Lifeguard Association, about half of the nation’s public pools will have to close or reduce their hours this summer because of a lack of staff.
The current shortage can be largely blamed on pandemic-era closures and work restrictions, according to news reports. But if that accounts for this year’s shortage as well as those reported in 2020, 2021, and 2022, it cannot explain the national lifeguard shortages of 2018, 2016, or 2012. Or, for that matter, a reported lifeguard shortage in 1984. Or 1951. Or 1926.
These crises—and the newspaper stories that describe them—are as much a summer tradition as boardwalks and ice cream. Local or national news articles on the subject have appeared in May or June of every single year of the 21st century. Hundreds more specimens of this perennial have been published since the 1930s. Each lays out the same basic claims: The swimming season might be compromised; drownings could increase. But few acknowledge that such claims were also made the year before, and in all the years before that. Indeed, the specter of a long, unguarded summer has haunted us for five generations now, about as long as there have been formally trained lifeguards in America.
The reasons given for the shortages have varied with the times. Now, of course, we have COVID. In the 1980s, authorities blamed Gen X demographics: “It’s happening because there simply aren’t as many 16-year-olds,” one told The New York Times. In the 1950s, they blamed the IRS: “Many lifeguards quit before earning $600 so their fathers can claim them as income tax dependents,” explained the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In the 1940s, experts said that the draft had roped in so many of the nation’s young men that, per The Baltimore Sun, some beaches and pools were “seriously considering employing women.” And in the 1930s, the shortage was attributed to the absorption of potential lifeguards into the Works Progress Administration.
But overall, the purported causes of shortages are remarkably repetitive and, in many cases, remarkably ahistoric.
The stringent requirements of lifeguarding—taking and paying for a multiday course to pass a tough physical exam—are a recurring scapegoat. So is low pay. In 1941, pool managers complained that young men who hadn’t been drafted could make much more working in defense industries than as a lifeguard. In 2007, a New Jersey lifeguard captain lamented to the Times that “iPods and cellphones are expensive … If kids are looking for the highest-paying job, it isn’t likely to be lifeguarding.” In that same article, a Connecticut parks official blamed the growing emphasis on career-building (and the concurrent rise of internships). The YMCA’s water-safety specialist also cited internships, in 2021. Any time unemployment is low, someone accuses it of contributing to the lifeguard shortage.
By far the most consistent explanations over the years can best be described as “kids these days.” See 1987: “The kids around here have too much money.” And 2015: “There is another big turnoff: having a phone on the lifeguard stand is a firing offense.” And 2019: “Some [teens] are even frightened of the lifesaving responsibility the job carries.” And 2022: “People just don’t want to do this kind of job.” And 2023: “Since COVID, people don’t want to work.” Wyatt Werneth, the national spokesperson for the American Lifeguard Association, told me this week that, after the pandemic arrived, people who might otherwise be lifeguard candidates began opting for jobs that could be done at home, such as “the influencing and social media and stuff like that.”
And then, of course, there’s the biggest problem of all: No one looks up to lifeguards anymore. From The New York Times in 1984: “Lifeguards were once authority figures, just like teachers once were. But the glory of the authoritarian age is gone.” In 1985, the Times wistfully recalled the lifeguard-loving cinema of the ’50s and ’60s (Beach Blanket Bingo and its ilk) and the reverence it once inspired. Robert A. Kerwin, the water-safety coordinator of the New Jersey State Division of Parks and Forestry, told the paper, “The day of the macho lifeguard sitting in the chair flexing his muscles is finished. For one thing, 25 percent of our guards are girls.” (For what it’s worth, Newspapers.com lists plenty of articles about lifeguard shortages from the ’50s and the ’60s too.)
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The Times once declared, “The lifeguard is an endangered species.” But its population recovered briefly in the 1990s, thanks to David Hasselhoff. “When I became a lifeguard,” Werneth said, “we had Baywatch, and everybody wanted to be a lifeguard. They wanted that lifestyle where you had helicopters and you had fast boats and beautiful people, and you’re saving lives.” But Baywatch: Hawaii ceased production in 2001, and after that, Werneth told me, “things started declining.” Lifeguard employment took a dip and then a swan dive starting in 2020. “I can almost call it a ground zero,” Bernard Fisher, the director of the American Lifeguard Association, said of the shortage in a 2022 Fox News article.
Despite the tenor of that analogy (Fisher also compared the lack of lifeguards to the lack of baby formula), drowning rates haven’t really spiked. In fact, they’re now a third of what they were in 1970, and have been dropping steadily for a century or more. (There was a very slight uptick in 2020 and 2021, the most recent years for which data are available.) In other words, the many lifeguard crises of the past—or perhaps the single, never-ending one—have not correlated with any widespread drowning crises in America. That does not mean that lifeguard shortages are fake, but hard data on their scope remain obscure. Werneth told me that the American Lifeguard Association receives “very sporadic” reports from pools, parks, and beaches, and has just a rough sense of the level of need in different regions.
But if the lifeguard is once again an endangered species, it’s still beloved: more like a giant panda than a Gerlach’s cockroach. As a culture, we do still think of lifeguards as sexy, heroic, and essential (if not authoritarian). Baywatch may be off the air, but it’s always coming back.
