People We Meet: Shari Chadwick, water woman

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The Michael Jackson impersonator was killing it on the deck of the Martin Luther King Jr. pool in Bayview. He leapt, tumbled, and moonwalked all over the deck while the aqua-fitness students splashed their approval, cheering and whooping in the cool blue water. The Michael impersonator had been invited by aqua fitness instructor Shari Chadwick to celebrate Bob’s birthday. Bob is her student, a huge Michael Jackson fan and a valuable assistant who helps set up the sound system, among other tasks.

“Dance like MJ in the water!!” Chadwick shouts to her students. “Shake your body down to the ground!! How low can you go?!?”

On most Tuesday and Thursday evenings, there are almost 80 bodies joyfully bobbing and weaving, swaying and swinging, in the shallow lanes at the Bayview pool. Soul music pulses out from a large speaker on the pool deck. Or Motown.

Like a queen in her water court, at the heart of the action, instructor Chadwick, age 61, calls out her signature throaty whoop, 

“HEY, HEY, HEY, HEY!”

The response comes back lustily,

“HEY, HEY, HEY, HEY!”

Chadwick flashes her radiant smile, “Got to hear you breathing!”

Bob shouts out, “MEN IN THE HOUSE!”

The pool brims over with men and women, teenagers to seniors, including people with disabilities.

Raising her arms over her head in what is almost a benediction, glistening with water drops, Chadwick intones, “Thank you, God, for getting all these beautiful bodies safely here today!”

The music picks up as she laughs and calls,

“Party over here!”

“Party right there,” the aqua congregation jumps and waves in response.

It’s hard to believe this is the same woman who was “petrified with fear” when she stepped into a pool for the first time, 25 years ago, at the Stonestown YMCA. She’d never learned to swim, and even the shallow end terrified her.

“I clutched the pool deck with both palms and stayed there, just swinging my legs.”

Pure desperation led this mother of three into the water. Unbearable pain from sciatica had made her life a misery, and her doctor suggested water exercise.

“I was at the point where I could hardly crawl to the bathroom or get in and out of my car.” She didn’t like the strong medications, yet she initially dismissed the pool advice as impossible for her, a non-swimmer.

The pain worsened: It was 24/7.

“So finally, one day, I went to the Stonestown Y to check it out, and I liked the vibe. I bought my first swimsuit. First, I just held on at the edge and moved my legs back and forth. I got a little deeper, and let my leg hang, and then I noticed a release in my back. No pain. Hmmmm. I dried off, went home, pain returned, but later that day I went back again. I began going three times daily, just moving myself in the water, and I got better. The water saved me.”

Shari says she owes her transformation from freaked-out pool deck “clutcher” to ebullient water dancer and beloved community aqua instructor to a mentor, Jody, (“a gift in my life”), and her own confidence building over time.

 Jody taught aqua aerobics at the Stonestown Y .

“She noticed me always over by myself, and she said I should take her class. Told her I can’t swim, and furthermore, ‘ How many black women do you see in the water? It’s about our hair!’ Jody answered: no problem and gave me a water belt, and I tell you that was a game changer! She told me to hold on the wall with just two fingers! Then I could exercise in the deep and never get my hair wet.”

Jody played Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers and rain forest sounds during her class at the Y. There were about 10 to 12 older white ladies, Chadwick recalls. 

At the MLK pool, Chadwick plays Motown, Count Basie and big-band music, soul and funk and gospel, and her classes are packed: From 40 to 80 regulars. 

Anthony, 73, who retired from the Mayor’s Office of Children, Youth and Families, is a believer.

“What she does is fantastic; lots of out-of-shape people come to her class, people who wouldn’t move otherwise. She gets them moving.”

Linda, wearing a neat shower cap to keep her hair dry, adds, “I might be the oldest one here. Don’t ask. A friend got me off the couch to come. Now, I never miss it.”

Chadwick was born in 1962 in San Francisco to a schoolteacher mom and an AC Transit bus driver dad. They met in San Francisco. “My dad had a friend, a trumpet player whose band played a club on Third Street: Sam Jordan’s, and mom knew one of the band’s girlfriends. Dad approached the table and asked, ‘Is anyone here single?’”

Her mother had come from Lake Charles, Louisiana, to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, and her dad hitchhiked out from Carthage, Texas, to LA, where he had an uncle. But they met in San Francisco.

Chadwick took a summer job as a teenager that turned into a seven-year job in customer service, doing credit card authorizations in an office under the Union 76 sign at the entrance to the Bay Bridge.

She attended City College of San Francisco for several years, and then eloped to Reno, Nevada, to marry Gregory Charles Morgan. She was 24.

“I met him on the freeway,” she says. “I just saw this muscled arm hanging out the driver’s window of a red Chevy, on 101 near Silver Avenue. He’d slow down, I’d slow down. He’d speed up, I’d speed up. Finally, he pulled over and said, ‘I got the feeling you are trying to tell me something.’”

Chadwick laughs, “He had on red short shorts, white tube socks, a mesh green shirt, it was the ’80s, OK?” 

Her daughter, Shunae, was born in 1985, and her son, Marques, in 1987. Another daughter, Monae, was born in 1994.

Her granddaughter, Ryan Sierre, was born in 2009.

Her life was filled with family, work, church, and community. 

Eventually, she went back to work for a mortgage company. Her marriage ended in 2013, and she helped care for her parents until the end of their lives. Her dad died in 2000 and her mom in 2022.

She could handle everything but the sciatica. When her pain started, it put a serious halt to some of her favorite activities, dancing and traveling. 

In the water, she felt grand. So it became a part of her life.

And yet, in 1999, when Jody asked her to lead the class and told her she should be an aqua instructor, she felt unqualified.

She’d never taught anything, plus she had to learn about the body’s bones and muscles. This is not a pushover certification. But the Y paid for the training and, three years after she stepped into the pool, she became the first Black certified instructor at the Stonestown YMCA. 

In the past 18 years, she has taught her signature moves in pools all over San Francisco: At the Bayview, Chinatown and Stonestown YMCAs, and at various Parks and Recreation pools. 

Eight years ago, she found her true north, her water home, at the MLK Pool on Carrol Street.

A volunteer, she teaches her class in the early evenings after putting in a full day’s work as the membership coordinator for a nonprofit, Common Sense Media.

She volunteers her time as an aqua instructor because, “As my grandmother always said: Every good thing you do to help people unconditionally, that earns you a white feather for your angel wings.”

The atmosphere is charged with gleeful anticipation on a recent summer evening, as the solstice sun warms all the waiting bodies in their towels and robes and flip-flops and swim shirts. There’s lots of joking and jostling as the line spills down the steps, waiting for the lifeguards to unlock the doors. Chadwick knows that some of her most faithful students are low-income, and she sees their swimming suits are worn out and they could use water shoes. And transportation. She wants to start a small nonprofit to raise money.

Chadwick points out the tallest gentleman in the crowd, Nelly, who joined her class three years ago. 

“He told me, ‘I‘ll be honest with you, I am scared of the water, but I need some help,’ and I just said, ‘Will you trust me?’ And I grabbed his hand and we took a walk in the water so he could get a feel for it, and he is holding my hand real tight, almost cutting off my circulation. As he gets to chest level I tell him, ‘This is your space here, just jump with me lightly, now, just hop.’ Then I told him, ‘You have to go against the water, cause it’s moving and it’s going to move you, so march forward.’ Now this man is the first guy to show up every week! I said to him, ‘I don’t give out door prizes for best attendance.’”

In one of her trademark moves, she reaches her arm backhanded across her body, leans forward, and swoops her arm away through the water, creating a water path, a current, a ripple. “Clear Your Path!” she tells her students. “Nothing is stopping you!”