Lifeguard Training HQ publishes guidance about lifeguard training, certification, preparation, employment and aquatic safety. Some of it concerns how to keep people from drowning, so it is worth being explicit about how it is produced and what it is not.
What this site is, and is not
Lifeguard Training HQ is an educational resource and a directory. It does not run courses, assess candidates or issue certifications. When a page refers to a specific course, price or schedule, that course is delivered by a training organization, not by this site.
American Aquatics and Safety Training is one such training organization and is a client of this site’s operator. Where its course is used as a concrete reference point, it is named. The commercial relationship is set out on our advertising disclosure page.
This matters because the two things get conflated constantly in this industry, and a reader deciding where to spend $195 deserves to know which one they are reading.
How content is written
Guides are written by the Lifeguard Training HQ editorial team. Location pages covering states, counties and cities are produced from structured data about those places and then written up; they describe training availability and general requirements rather than making claims about individual facilities.
How content is reviewed
Pages covering course structure, prerequisites, skills assessment and certification validity are reviewed for technical accuracy by a subject-matter reviewer before publication.
Where a page has been reviewed, it says so, and it names the reviewer and the date. Where a page carries no review line, it has not been individually reviewed. We do not apply a review credit across the site on the strength of one review, because that would make the credit meaningless. Our current reviewer is Jackie Hamper.
Sourcing
Three rules govern what we will state as fact.
- Regulatory claims come from primary sources. Where we describe a federal or state rule, we cite the regulation and link to it, so you can check it rather than take our word for it. The clearest example is the federal restriction on where a 15-year-old may be employed as a lifeguard, which we cite to 29 CFR 570.34 rather than paraphrasing it from another website.
- We do not assert that training is legally required unless an authority actually requires it. Most states regulate aquatic facilities, not individual lifeguards, and the difference matters. If a page here ever tells you a programme is mandated by your state, it should name the statute. If it does not, treat that as an error and tell us.
- We do not invent specifics about places. Location pages do not list facility names, schedules or prices we cannot source. Where something varies by employer, facility, county or programme, we say that instead of picking a number.
What we will not publish
- Claims of accreditation, approval or recognition that we cannot substantiate.
- Credentials or affiliations attributed to people or organizations without a source.
- A statement that a credential is accepted somewhere, phrased as though acceptance were universal. Acceptance varies by employer and facility, and we say so.
- Reviews or ratings that are not genuine.
Dates
A review date on a page is the date the review happened. It is deliberately not tied to the last time the page was edited, so a typographical correction never implies that a reviewer looked at the content again.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and specificity helps: the page, the sentence, and what the correct position is. Contact us and we will check it against the source and correct the page.
This applies particularly to state and local requirements, which change, and which we would rather hear about from someone who works under them than discover a year later.