KAROL KUDYBA
Sports Writer

What do you do when someone yells “fire” in a crowed hallway?

Competitors at the Provincial Lifeguard Championships had to figure it out quick or risk losing lives. On the afternoon of Nov. 13 at the downtown YMCA, teams of teenaged lifesavers competed to show their lifesaving skills in a variety of simulated life-or-death challenges.

The teams, with competitors aged 14 to 19, were placed in life-saving scenarios and given eight minutes to deal with scripted ordeals. Challenges included underwater rescues and patching very-realistic looking cuts, to helping move a patient with a spinal cord injury while surrounded by a mob of panicked bystanders.

To make things more interesting, new situations would emerge while dealing with others, forcing the competitors to survey the new situations carefully and decide how to best spend their time.

After dealing with the stampede, the next component of the competition was a water rescue.

In the competition, various victims were spread out among a public swim. The public swimmers were unaware of the competition, and came face-to-face with actors ominously bobbing face-down in the water.

The most fun in this challenge was had by a judge playing a diabetic mother, whose sugar deprivation caused her to yell at her child in the pool and everyone around her. For a perfect score, it was up to the lifeguards to notice that contrary to her screaming, the problem was not her child’s swimming but her off-hand remarks about how she had not had anything for breakfast. If her condition wasn’t noticed in the first three minutes, she would pass out poolside, leading to a whole new problem.

In coming up with the scenarios, judge and one of the competition organizers Shawn Weiman tried to imagine situations that tested the skills that the lifeguards have learned in classes, including their multi-tasking and crisis management abilities.

“The important thing is to try and simulate in as real a fashion as possible,” said Weiman. “Lifeguards don’t get a lot of opportunity to practice these skills, which is good, but a lot of what they’re doing on a daily basis is preventing the accidents, not dealing with what happens next. By practicing in competitive situations, it puts them as close to real life as we can give them.

“We do like to push them almost to the extreme, put them on the edge of adrenaline, but at the same time keep it real so that they’re actually getting experience and they’re learning,” Weiman explained.

Unfortunately, the number of competing teams has dwindled in recent years. In the past there have been as many as 20 teams. This year only three entered.

The competition was organized in part by past competitor and man-fish Robby Davis, a University of Saskatchewan student who has been involved in lifeguarding for the past seven years. Davis, whose Aquaman-like skills and chiseled physique have saved countless injured swimmers in the past, now passes his skills on to the next generation of Mitch Buckhannons and Caroline Holdens.

While the lifeguards may never actually have to deal with situations such as a heart-attack while in the pool, it’s nice to know that they’ll be ready for it.

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image: Brittany Smith