The Committee Meeting Where I Asked for a Hot Room

Five Fifteen in July

There is a particular kind of cold that lives in the Pietermaritzburg valley in July. It settles in the bowl of the city overnight and sits there until the sun has the strength to push it out, which on most winter mornings is around ten. Our squad trains at quarter past five.

I have coached the school swim club for nine years. Before that I swam for Natal as a teenager, badly, and then for my university, slightly less badly, and then I spent a decade selling insurance before I admitted that the only part of my week I looked forward to was the hour on the pool deck. So I took the coaching job and a pay cut, and my wife, Anke, said she had never seen me happier or poorer.

The pool is heated, sort of. The heat pump was installed in 2014 and has the general enthusiasm of a man asked to help move a couch. In July the water sits at about twenty-four degrees if we are lucky. The air above it, at five in the morning, is often three or four. The children climb out between sets into weather that has no business near a swimming pool.

The Boy Who Shook

Every squad has one. Ours was a Grade 9 boy called Ruben, all elbows and ribs, the skinniest swimmer I have ever coached, with a natural freestyle that made the older kids go quiet when they watched him. He was also, that winter, permanently cold.

He shivered through warm-up. He shivered through the main set. He shivered on the blocks while I explained the next drill, and his teeth made a sound I could hear from the other end of the lane. His lips went a colour that made me check my watch and count minutes. Twice I sent him home early, and twice his mother phoned me to ask, politely, whether I was trying to get her son to quit.

I was not. I was trying to stop him from becoming hypothermic in the name of a 200 metre time. But I had nothing to give him. Towels got wet. The change rooms were concrete and somehow colder than outside. The kids huddled under the stands in parkas between sessions, and the parents who did drop-off stood in the car park with flasks of coffee, steaming like horses.

In the second week of July, Ruben did not come to training. He did not come the next day either. On the Friday I saw him at break, and he told me, looking at his shoes, that he was thinking of switching to chess club. "It's inside, sir," he said. I did not laugh. I have rarely felt less like laughing.

An Idea From a Holiday

The idea came from a family trip to Finland years earlier, when Anke's cousin married a man from Tampere and we were dragged into a lakeside cabin and told, very seriously, that we would be sitting in a wooden box at eighty degrees and then jumping into a lake. I hated it for about four minutes and then loved it in a way that embarrassed me. I came home talking about it for weeks.

It occurred to me, standing on the pool deck at dawn watching kids shiver, that the Finns had solved this exact problem centuries ago. Get hot. Get cold. Get hot again. A small hot room next to the pool would let the children warm their muscles between sets and after training, and send them into their first lesson of the day without blue lips.

I went home that evening and spent an embarrassing amount of time reading about saunas, the difference between wood-fired and electric, how many people a small cabin would seat, what kind of ventilation a school building would need. I learned that a sauna for twenty teenagers is not the same as a sauna for one tired insurance salesman, and that the electrical side would need proper sign-off. I looked up a few local sauna suppliers to get some rough idea of what I would be asking for, mostly so I would not sound like a fool in front of the committee.

The Meeting

The swim club committee meets on the first Tuesday of the month in the staff room, around a table with a burn mark in the middle that nobody has ever explained. There are seven members. There is a chairman, Mr Dlamini, a retired accountant who loves procedure the way some men love rugby. There is a treasurer, Mrs Botha, who has kept the club solvent for twelve years with a ruthlessness I both admire and fear. And there are parents, some engaged, some there for the biscuits.

My item was eleventh on the agenda, after the gala budget, the new kickboards, and a twenty-minute discussion about whether the tuckshop could sell energy drinks. By the time Mr Dlamini read out "Coach: proposal regarding a heated room," it was half past eight, and two parents had already put their coats on.

I had prepared. I had a printout with water and air temperatures from the last six weeks. I had attendance figures showing that our morning numbers dropped by almost a third every July. I had, God help me, a photo of Ruben on the blocks with his arms wrapped around himself, taken with his mother's permission. I talked for six minutes.

Mrs Botha spoke first. "And how," she said, "are we going to pay for this?"

Cake, Mostly

The honest answer was that I did not know. The club's budget would not cover it. The school's budget would definitely not cover it. Mr Dlamini suggested we form a subcommittee, which in my experience is where good ideas go to die quietly.

But then one of the quieter mothers, a woman named Nomsa whose twin daughters swim breaststroke, put her hand up. "My girls get cold too," she said. "I'll do a cake sale." Someone else offered a quiz night. A father who owns a hardware store said he would see what he could do about materials. Ruben's mother, who I did not know was in the room, said from the back that she would bake, and that she was very good at milk tart.

What followed was eight months of the most South African fundraising you have ever seen. Cake sales every Friday. A braai at the school's rugby derby. A raffle for a weekend at somebody's uncle's farm near Howick. A sponsored swim where the kids collected pledges per length and one Grade 8 girl swam 200 lengths out of pure spite after her brother told her she would not manage fifty.

Mrs Botha counted every cent and reported at every meeting with a face that slowly, over the months, softened.

The Day It Was Finished

We did it properly in the end. The electrical work was signed off, a small cabin was built into the corner of the pool building where an old storeroom used to be, and the whole thing was done by people who do sauna installations for a living, which I insisted on after reading one too many stories about homemade heaters. I was not going to save twenty children from the cold just to set the change rooms on fire.

It opened on the first Monday of the following June. I had told nobody exactly when it would be ready. At quarter past five that morning, in the dark, the squad came out of the water after the first set into four degree air, and instead of huddling under the stands, they filed into a small wooden room that smelled of pine and heat.

Ruben was back. He had quit chess club after a term, he said, because it was boring and someone kept stealing his rook. He sat on the top bench with his eyes closed and his shoulders loose, and after ten minutes he looked at me through the glass and gave me a thumbs up.

He did a personal best in the 200 that August. I do not claim the hot room did that. He did it. But he did it without shaking, and that was all I wanted.