Bradford Worrell is back where it all began – at the Rodney Heights Aquatic Centre, the pool that helped to shape his childhood and launched his swimming career.
After ten years in the US building a successful swim programme, the former national athlete has returned home with a vision to raise the bar for swimming in Saint Lucia and foster a stronger sense of community in the sport.
Born in Virginia, David and Brad migrated to Saint Lucia with their parents and brother Frederick in 1994. Brad was seven. In the US, the boys had competed for Richmond Racers, and when their mother, Dr Diane Worrell, founded RHAC in 2000, the next step was clear.
Brad went on to represent Saint Lucia at meets ranging from the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States Championships all the way up to the FINA (now World Aquatics) World Short Course Championships, until 2014. Since 2013, Worrell Enterprises (WE) Aquatics, or WeAquatics, has been sharing the love of swimming with students of all ages.
“It’s been on my 10-year plan to come back,” said Brad. “My brother messaged me in 2014. At that point, I was here coaching swimming, managing the facility, doing pool maintenance, everything that goes along with running the facility. And he needed somebody that he could rely on that would help him build his swim school. And so I agreed.”
Though the intention was always to expand across the greater DMV region, WeAquatics began in a modest location. Today, the programme operates at 23 venues with dozens of coaches, offering infant survival swimming and private one-on-one lessons for children, adults and people with special needs. But Brad’s personal plans were still waiting to be fulfilled.
Now a qualified infant swimming master instructor, he found himself increasingly drawn back to Saint Lucia. The growing demands on his mother to run RHAC, coupled with Saint Lucia’s waning returns at meets like the OECS Championships, helped make up his mind.
“My vision has always been to create a centre of excellence for the facility, and it not just be around swimming, but be about swimming, fitness, nutrition, you know, creating a holistic environment where kids of all backgrounds, not necessarily just swimming, can come,” Worrell explained.
With the National Aquatic Centre under construction at Beausejour, including a 50-metre pool, he sees RHAC as a natural complement to the larger facility. He believes RHAC can continue laying the foundation for Saint Lucia’s emerging swimmers.
“I think that the mindset, the philosophy, the base of the competitiveness of the swimmers in this area will come from here and then migrate and just be able to get experience with longer course swimming that they don’t get here, but they do have on the regional and international level,” said Worrell. ‘So I think the goal is just to be able to push them towards that facility and be able to use that to continue to grow their talents.”
On a broader scale, the Howard University graduate is keen to lift swimming locally as a whole. Home since June, he told St Lucia Times he has taken a watching brief. One of the things he says he has noticed is that intermediate and stronger swimmers often train in isolation, as opposed to pushing each other to grow.
“When I was 12, 13, I was training in lanes with Nicholas and Jamie Peterkin, Danielle Beaubrun, Olympians, and they pushed me to the next level,” Worrell said. “And I think that allowed me to be more competitive in the region and allowed me to see more of that world view of, it’s not just me, it’s us as a collective. We’ll pull each other and push each other along. And I think I want to see more of that in the local swimming community.”
