Southampton Town launching new certification course in Bridgehampton to address lifeguard shortage

In an effort to attract more locals to watch over its often understaffed easterly beaches, the Town of Southampton is launching a new lifeguard certification course in Bridgehampton this month.

The basic lifeguard training course, for which anyone can register online, will begin May 27 at the Bridgehampton Tennis & Surf Club. For those looking for “surf” lifeguard certification, meaning they are qualified to watch over swimmers in ocean waters as well as the calmer bay areas, training will be held at Sagg Main Beach in Sagaponack starting June 7. Scholarships to cover certification costs are available through the STAR AquaCenter, a Southampton-based nonprofit. 

The town will also host lifeguard training at Suffolk County Community College’s Eastern Campus in Riverhead, as it has in previous years. That course will begin May 13.

Kristen Doulos, the Southampton Town parks director, said she generally has no trouble finding staff for the town's four beaches west of the Shinnecock Canal. But most lifeguards, especially those coming from hamlets west of the town, do not want to drive farther east on an often-bottlenecked Sunrise Highway to work, she said.

Doulos hopes the new training course in Bridgehampton will attract local high school and college students, as well as teachers who have the summers off, to cover its eastern beaches: Flying Point, Foster Memorial, Mecox, Sagg Main and W. Scott Cameron.

“Sometimes we can’t open all five beaches out there,” Doulos said in a phone interview Friday.

While the traffic is a long-running problem, she added that another issue is compensation.

“Minimum wage has increased steadily and as that goes up, the [wages at] private clubs just keep getting that much higher as well," she said. The town's starting pay for lifeguards this year is $19.89 per hour. 

She noted that the town not only competes with private beach clubs for new hires, but also Southampton Village and East Hampton Town.

The lifeguard shortage is most often felt from mid-August through Labor Day, when college-age lifeguards leave to begin their fall semesters and fall high school sports begin. Before resorting to closing a beach for a day, she said the town will reassign lifeguards from their preferred western location and coordinate enough staffing to allow swimming in a smaller area.

Recruitment efforts

The struggle to acquire lifeguards is not unique to the Town of Southampton.

In the Town of Riverhead, Superintendent of Recreation Ray Coyne said the town over the past three years has begun recruitment efforts such as starting the search earlier in the year and bolstering the parks department’s presence at high school job fairs and on social media.

“We’re in pretty good shape with our lifeguard roster for this year,” Coyne said in an interview Friday. “If you can get them early enough, they spend their time from high school to college seasonally with you. We’re lucky in that realm that … a lot of our people returned.”

The Suffolk County Parks Department, which hires lifeguards to protect swimmers at Cupsogue, Meschutt and Smith Point beaches, found success by bolstering its social media presence and hosting in-person lifeguarding information sessions at libraries near their beaches, according to Hilary Hoffman, a public relations assistant for the parks department.

“Because of our efforts in previous years, we’ve had a really good year recruitment-wise,” Hoffman said.