National Black Heritage Swim Meet

By Alex Granados,

Published May 27, 2011 at 12:20 PM EDT

Go to a competitive swim meet and you are likely to encounter a sea of white faces. Minorities are notoriously underrepresented in the sport.

But about 14 years ago, a group of North Carolina parents got together and decided to make swimming a little more diverse. They formed a traveling swim team called the North Carolina Aquablazers and in 2003, they started the National Black Heritage Championship Swim Meet. The annual meet will be held this weekend at the Triangle Aquatic Center in Cary, NC. Host Frank Stasio talks about it with Lisa Webb, vice president and co-founder of the North Carolina Aquablazers swim team, and Tom Hazelett, Aquatics director at the downtown Durham YMCA and Durham site coach for the YMCA of The Triangle swim team.

Alex Granados

Alex Granados joined The State of Things in July 2010. He got his start in radio as an intern for the show in 2005 and loved it so much that after trying his hand as a government reporter, reader liaison, features, copy and editorial page editor at a small newspaper in Manassas, Virginia, he returned to WUNC. Born in Baltimore but raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, Alex moved to Raleigh in time to do third grade twice and adjust to public school after having spent years in the sheltered confines of a Christian elementary education. Alex received a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also has a minor in philosophy, which basically means that he used to think he was really smart but realized he wasn’t in time to switch majors. Fishing, reading science fiction, watching crazy movies, writing bad short stories, and shooting pool are some of his favorite things to do. Alex still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, but he is holding out for astronaut.

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Frank Stasio

Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.

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