--- title: "How urSwim Fills Gaps Left by Brick & Mortar Swim Schools" url: https://burnaze.com/article/d5e23b4b-95e4-4a1c-9f6a-4fc136a852bf source: "Franchise Magazine USA" original_url: https://franchisemagazineusa.com/how-urswim-fills-swim-school-gaps/ author: "David Gibb" category: "Swim" industry: "Education & Childcare" segment: "Swim" published: 2026-07-02T13:42:17.000Z modified: 2026-10-31T21:43:58.002Z image: https://franchisemagazineusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/URSwimContentShoot-65-1024x684.jpg --- # How urSwim Fills Gaps Left by Brick & Mortar Swim Schools **TL;DR:** urSwim, a swim education franchise, has developed a community-responsive model to fill gaps in the market left by traditional brick-and-mortar swim schools. The company, founded by Marina Mentzel in 2013, utilizes existing pool space and offers tailored swim programs to customers. *By David Gibb, originally published in Franchise Magazine USA on 2026-07-02. [Read the original](https://franchisemagazineusa.com/how-urswim-fills-swim-school-gaps/).* ## Story Marina Mentzel, founder of urSwim, was a lifelong swimmer who’d served as a swim instructor and lifeguard throughout college and law school. As her side hustle grew and she learned about franchising in school, she got the idea of creating a swim concept that would fill the need for high-quality instruction using a community-responsive franchise model. Marina started urSwim in 2013 and gave herself one year to succeed or fail. More than ten years later, she’s still running urSwim and overseeing a growing franchise system. I think when you think of swim education, most people’s heads go to the class with 10-plus kids and there’s about 7 group lessons going on at the same time. The volume of noise in these facilities, the acoustics, it’s really high sensory. And frankly, in my opinion, just a very difficult environment for anybody to learn. It’s also very difficult environment for us to teach, and I know, because I taught in those environments for quite some time when I was younger. So, first and foremost, one of the things we prioritized is size of group. For us, it was really important to scale it down to no more than four. urSwim also utilizes existing pool space, which means they bring swim education to communities without the time and expense of constructing new facilities. So, again, for a child who might have sensory issues or for an instructor who’s trying to command and class manage their little young swimmers, I think it was really important to look at the environment. Then there’s the issue of curriculum. Here in the United States, swim instruction is pretty much at the whims of the swim school providers, and one of the things we wanted to do was tailor our swim programs to our customers. We’re hyper-focused on identifying key skills, safety skills. We’re also hyper-focused on transitioning from safety skill acquisition to students learning what it means to be a swimmer and what’s available to them once they know the strokes and safety skills and have built up some endurance. And then one last need that I feel we address is that the swim school industry is almost exclusively focused on children – rightly, they need to build swimming skills – but there’s a whole category of adults who never learned how to swim who fall into the gaps. Swimming has all kinds of benefits for health and wellness as a low-impact activity. It makes water recreation much safer. It opens up gateways to all sorts of other possibilities – you’ll never do a triathlon unless you know how to swim. But adult education isn’t part of the core offerings for any of the big box swim schools. We’re a little bit more of a nimble business model, intentionally, to be able to do that. I think the appetite for the big box swim schools, as franchise systems, will continue to be there. But they’re not going to open in those markets where it doesn’t make sense to build $2,000,000 worth of infrastructure. Swim education is something that every child and every adult should have access to. So, what we were trying to do is really meet those gaps by using existing commercial or residential pools. We can supply the franchisees with the tools needed to go ahead and build out programs that make sense for your communities. Again, it’s not a one-size-fits-all, and there’s not a community that wouldn’t benefit from having really high-quality swim instructors, as well as high-quality lifeguards and aquatics personnel. So, we’re really increasing access to meet the needs of markets where the brick-and-mortar model doesn’t make sense. Within a year or two of me launching the brand, we started to get a lot of commercial B2B inquiries where they were like, “Hey, we love what you’re doing here. Can you do this in our facility? Can you do it for our HOA? Could you do this at our summer camp? Could you do this at our municipal program? We really like the offering!” So, I quickly discovered that there were a lot of gaps in the market that competitors just weren’t filling. So many people were looking for highly trained lifeguards. They were looking for someone to manage, train, and certify those lifeguards. They were also looking for custom swim programming. We started becoming the aquatics programming for our summer camp clients, who were very happy to offboard that and focus on what they’re great at, which is summer camp. For us, the value proposition became, “Let us do what we’re good at.” This is what we do. We curate this talent, we train this talent, we certify this talent. We have relationships with this talent. Let us provide that expertise to your facility so your camp team can stay focused on the many other priorities required to deliver an exceptional camper experience. This past year, our B2C and B2B business have been a pretty even split. We’re really excited to be – I believe – the only swim school provider that has this additional revenue stream and does it in a really intentional way. My intention was to build a model that could work for the franchisee based on their specific demographics and geography. And because we were multi-vertical system, it allows them to pull the levers with our support and our data and decide what actually makes sense and what the community needs. I like people that are community advocates. For us, this is a relationship-based service, and we are interfacing with our customers and our staff every day. People who succeed thrive in face-to-face interaction, are comfortable leading teams and managing a staff where maybe you’re their first or second employer. First and foremost, you have to be comfortable with people. This is for people who love interfacing with people. As an emerging franchise or, there is a learning curve. Our franchisees right now are providing a ton of feedback, and I’m listening to all the things that they don’t love to do. And as an operator myself, I also resonate with some of the things that I don’t like to do. So, how do we conquer that? That is something that I’m really passionate about. How do we build backend systems that can alleviate some of the pain and, again, provide a solution at scale? One practice we’ve been working on since we became a franchisor is really qualifying leads, taking some of those administrative duties so we can put the right customer in front of our operators and set them up to have great conversations with the customers, build those relationships, and make sure those kids (or adults) are learning what they want to learn. We also have meetings called “What’s Keeping You Up at Night?” where we bring the operators together to talk through how we can problem solve common pain points as a system. I can’t promise that I can solve every issue that’s raised on those calls, but I want to be aware of anything so that I can get ahead of it. We’re a very young franchise system, but my goals are big. And if there’s some sort of data point that I can start working from and building in the background, I want the feedback because I do want to start troubleshooting it with the team. Part of our core mission is to teach 1,000,000 swimmers how to swim. So, that is what drives me, that’s what drives our team, and hopefully that is what drives our operators. I’m on a mission to achieve that goal, and franchising was a way that I felt we could do it more strategically and more effectively in a way that worked hand-in-hand with the communities we serve. The ambition is there. The goal is big. I never set out to be a swim school, and I think we get lumped in that category, but we really want to be an aquatic platform. We’re not only going to provide you those safety skills in the water by teaching you swim education and teaching how to keep your family safe. You might also see us at your community pool lifeguarding. We’ll be out of the water, too, providing training to our communities. We want to be the water safety advocates. We want communities to look at us as the experts in and out of the water. We have an ambitious mission. We are young, but I am motivated. ## Entities - Franchise Magazine USA (publication) - franchise model (topic) - Education (sector) - David Gibb (person) - community development (topic) - swim education (topic) - Marina Mentzel (person) - urSwim (company) - pool management (topic) - aquatics programs (topic) --- Originally reported by David Gibb, Franchise Magazine USA (https://franchisemagazineusa.com/how-urswim-fills-swim-school-gaps/). Summarized by Burnaze (https://burnaze.com/article/d5e23b4b-95e4-4a1c-9f6a-4fc136a852bf).