Move Over, Fellas: Wave of Women Boosting the Avalon Beach Patrol
Posing with their trophy from the Ocean City Women’s Invitational are (from left) Alyssa Sittineri, Molly McDonnell, Cackie Martin, Becca Cubbler and Maggie Mikalic. It was the Avalon Beach Patrol’s first-ever women’s team championship.
Danielle Smith tried out for the Avalon Beach Patrol on a whim in 2013 – just to see if she could make it.
She not only made it, but she has thrived and is in her ninth year on the vaunted patrol. Smith also made history last summer when she was named the first female lieutenant.
The Wilmington native has been coming to the area beaches all of her life. Her parents have a home in Stone Harbor.
“I am the first female lieutenant,” says Smith, a high school health and physical education teacher in Delaware. “It was definitely something that I always had in the back of my mind when I first started because there never was one before, but then I just did the job, I did it well, I loved it. I tried extremely hard to better myself as a guard and as a leader and it was noticed, obviously. I got a phone call from my chief [Matt Wolf] in April of last year and he offered me the position of lieutenant, which was a huge honor for me and a shock ... It was a really special moment.”
Smith is one example of the increased opportunities women have been getting as part of the Avalon Beach Patrol. This summer there were 25 women lifeguards among some 120 roster spots. On Aug. 5, one of the busiest beach days of the summer, 26% of all stand positions were occupied by women.
Avalon hired its first “bathing masters” in 1906. The name changed to lifeguards within a few years. The first female lifeguard on the patrol was Meg Patterson in 1976.
Matt Wolf took over as chief of the Avalon Beach Patrol last summer, taking the baton from his father Murray, a legend in the area who had served as Avalon’s captain since the 1960s and is credited with nearly 70 years of beach-patrol service.
The younger Wolf, who is in his 25th year of lifeguarding, grew up on 19th Street in Avalon and lives a half-mile from the house he grew up in. He takes great family pride in being a part of the ABP.
“I’m Avalon through and through,” says Wolf, who teaches and coaches at Middle Township High School. “I feel like people are maybe becoming more aware of trying to be inclusive of all different types of people, and lifeguarding, certainly for years and years, like many industries, was dominated by men. You start noticing over time, women can certainly do the job every bit as well as men can, so you want to include that other 50% of the population when you talk about hiring lifeguards. And we talk all the time about not hiring people but hiring the right people is so important in what we do.
“We’ve been very fortunate in the last couple of years to have more and more women applying and to have very high-end women with outstanding resumés applying to be lifeguards. I think that’s added a whole other element to the Avalon Beach Patrol.”
Stepping up in competitions
Becca Cubbler is one of those women.
Now in her third year on the ABP, Cubbler, a native of Royersford, Pa., always spent a lot of time in Avalon in the summers. Her grandparents had built a home in the borough when her mother was a young girl.
“I’ve been coming down here every summer since I was born,” says Cubbler, who will teach fourth grade in Pennsylvania this school year. “I used to teach surf lessons, and during COVID they weren’t sure we were going to be able to do that, so I needed to find another job. I knew the beach patrol was hiring and that they paid pretty well and it seemed like they all enjoyed it. I figured, ‘Why not? Go out for it and see what happens.’ Here I am.”
She was a standout distance freestyle swimmer for Bloomsburg University. She finished college in 2020.
“It’s definitely different,” Cubbler says. “I definitely swim a lot less yardage, but, honestly, I’m in better shape than I ever thought I would be outside of college. I didn’t think I would still be able to be at this level of competition, but I swim for a masters team at home, so I practice with them all throughout the winter. I lift a lot, so that helps with the strength.”
Women on the ABP traditionally haven’t had a ton of success competitively, but that has started to change. This season, critical scoring by women with the ABP helped the patrol to capture both the Beschen-Callahan and Dutch Hoffman Championships. ABP also won two races and the team title at the Ocean City Beach Patrol Women’s Invitational.
The Hoffmans is one of the “big three” championships in South Jersey, and Avalon won it this year for the first time in more than four decades. The formats of both competitions have evolved to include both male and female competitions.
Cubbler finished first in the women’s swim, helping lead the patrol to the team title at the Dutch Hoffmans on Aug. 1. She had also won the women’s swim and can run at Beschen-Callahan on July 15 and won the women’s surf dash relay with teammate Jill McEntee and the box swim relay along with Maggie Mikalic at the Ocean City Beach Patrol Women’s Invitational on July 20.
“I honestly did not expect to win,” Cubbler says. “I know there’s a lot of girls out there that are still in college swimming like 10,000 yards a day in the winter, so it was a big surprise in the first one, and they kind of just kept coming.”
Avalon finished with 23 points for the team title at the Hoffmans, while the Sea Isle City Beach Patrol was second (15 points) and The Margate City Beach Patrol was third (14 points). ABP’s Dolan Grisbaum won the 600-yard men’s swim race and teammate Brandon Hontz took the one-mile run. Cubbler earned the team’s third first-place finish, and Erich Wolf (Matt’s brother) sealed the win with a second-place finish in the singles row.
“Becca is killing it,” Matt Wolf says. “She won the Dutch Hoffman swim, which is one of biggest lifeguard racing events of the summer. Our men’s swimmer Dolan Grisbaum won, so we won the men’s swim and the women’s swim. It was awesome to have that clean sweep.
“She is fantastic. It’s pretty rare for swimmers, especially, to win these competitions after they’ve graduated because there’s so much training that goes into swimming.”
‘It warms my heart’
Smith never rowed until she joined the beach patrol and now rowing is something she’s known for. She began rowing her first year and progressed and became a strong competitor.
“My rowing partner at the time, she’s no longer a guard, her name is Reilly Bonner,” Smith says. “She and I started winning the doubles row for women … That’s kind of when the women started stepping up in the patrols, when we started banding together, practicing, spending time in the boats and in the ocean and running and practicing surf dash.”
Wolf notes that Smith is well-educated with a master’s degree and that her education background also made her a great candidate for lieutenant.
“She teaches health and phys ed, she’s got a degree in exercise sports science, which we feel fits very well on the beach because again it’s an athletic job,” he says. “Danielle’s one of our competitors. She’s done well in women’s lifeguard racing. She’s at one of our biggest beaches on 12th Street as a lifeguard, so she kind of checked all those boxes in the things we’re looking for when hiring officers.
“Obviously, education fits in well with lifeguarding because of your schedule … Our lieutenants and our officers, we’re looking for people who are educators, generally speaking, because they’re going to work well with our workforce, which is mostly kids, whether it be high school kids, college kids, but mostly kids and young adults.”
Wolf says he believes very strongly in the work that the ABP does.
“In the last year, our lifeguards made 619 rescues in the 101 days we were on duty between Memorial Day and Labor Day,” he notes. “I think our guards feel an enormous sense of responsibility each day that they walk down to the stand and their high level of commitment to ensuring no one drowns is inspiring to be around.
“I grew up with it. I live here, I teach and coach at the local high school. Many of the kids that work for us now are kids that I taught and coached or that I still teach and coach. I’m in my 25th year of lifeguarding. I started when I was 14 and I work with two of my brothers [Tyler and Erich].”
Monica O’Donoghue was a member of the ABP from 2004 through 2012, starting off as a beach tagger, then becoming a lifeguard in 2010. She is now the first woman to head up the Avalon Beach Patrol Alumni Association.
Lifeguarding is also in her genes: Her grandfather John Buckley was a Margate City lifeguard. Her brother Matt was also on the Avalon Beach Patrol.
“When I was on the patrol, there were only a handful of us,” says O’Donoghue, who grew up in Haddonfield but spent her summers in Avalon since her parents have a home there. “We were small but mighty. It’s great to see how many more women are on the patrols now and how well they’re doing in the competitions.”
She rowed for Harvard for a year and transferred to Villanova, graduating in 2012. While she didn’t row at Villanova, the love for it was still there.
“That’s kind of what drew me to the lifeguards, originally, because they have rowing,” says O’Donoghue, who resides in Philadelphia.
It was a little bit intimidating trying out with all the men, but she remembers holding her own. (The lifeguarding test is the same for women and men.) She said there were about 10 women on the ABP when she was on it.
Now that number is more than double.
“It’s awesome,” Cubbler says. “They’re increasing every year.”
“It’s great,” Smith says. “I love it. It warms my heart. When I first started, there weren’t that many girls on the beach patrol and it was a different climate. I can’t begin to describe how proud I am to watch that growth in my nine years here.”