On a warm July morning, colorful umbrellas already dot the long stretch of sand at Horseneck Beach in Westport, Mass. Kids play in the surf, people doze in beach chairs, and it’s easy to imagine no one’s working.
Until you consider this scene from Chris Boyle’s point of view.
“It’s known as a very dangerous beach,” said Boyle. “The conditions are such that you have to really, really, really focus.”
Boyle supervises the lifeguard team and he’s seen how quickly a calm scene can turn into a chaotic one. An undertow pulls out swimmers, children disappear beneath the surf, someone goes into cardiac arrest. It can happen anytime and, sometimes, he says, all at once.
Yet Boyle, an assistant principal at Dartmouth High School, has returned to his job on the beach every summer since 1980. He has photos from back then that show teams of lifeguards wearing orange suits and, in Boyle’s case, a Tom Selleck mustache.
“I had more hair then,” he says with a wry smile, “mostly on the lip.”
More than mustaches have changed since the 1980’s. Back then getting a lifeguard job on this beach meant beating out stiff competition.
“When I tried out there were nine slots and high 40’s, 45, 50 people trying out for those nine positions,” recalled Boyle.
Fast-forward to this summer when just 15 people competed for eight lifeguard openings.
What’s changed since Boyle was a college kid?
For one, he says, we know a lot more now about the potentially lethal consequences of sun exposure.
But 16-year-old Luke Pichette — a first-year life guard here at Horseneck Beach — thinks there’s another reason many of his peers would rather do something else: being a lifeguard is hard work.
“You have to practice swimming, you have to work out a lot,” said Pichette. “It took me an entire year of getting my certs and working out to get this job, and I feel like a lot of kids don’t want to do that. They’d just rather work at a grocery store.”
Lifeguarding generally pays more. In an effort to attract more candidates, the state raised the starting salary at state-run beaches like this one to $15 per hour. And many organizations offer lifeguard certification classes at no charge. Of course, guarding a beach requires more training than guarding a pool. And several years ago, in an effort to get more people on the job, the Red Cross started offering certification for shallow water-only lifeguards.
That certification qualifies a lifeguard to work at a pool no more than five feet in depth.
"If they've got that certification, it means they can do most of the lifeguard skills, we just need to help them with a few more," said Jeremy Stiles, senior aquatics director at the YMCA of Greater Boston.
Stiles says lifeguards used to come looking for jobs. Now, he says, he'll train anyone with an interest. Even, he says, if they lack something fundamental.
"We'll recruit anyone that wants to work with kids, and we'll offer on-the-job training both for life-guarding and swim instruction," said Stiles, "even if they don't know how to swim. Now, at the end of the certification class they have to pass all the prerequisites to be a lifeguard,"
Skills are essential. But Chris Boyle says this job also requires something else.
“It’s the ocean. You have to love the ocean,” said Boyle. “You have to love the job.”
