Rutland Senior Secondary Grade 10 student Tanav Goel saved someone's life. 
He said it was a surreal experience to have applied his training from his first year in the Lifeguard Academy at RSS to a real emergency. 
He recalls how his heart was thumping and all the noise around him was filtered out for those few moments, as he successfully was able to dislodge a food item stuck in a young child's throat by applying pressure to the youngster's abdomen. 
For his Lifeguard Academy instructor RSS teacher Allan McNabb, Tanav's actions were a classic application of simulated training taking precedence over any nerves the 16-year-old felt when confronted with the prospect of saving someone's life. 
McNabb says from not hesitating to help, to asking the mother for permission to try and help her child, to saving the youngster's life, it was a textbook response from Tanav. 
"We teach our lifeguard students to face pressure situations and make quick decisions to save lives," McNabb said. 
What Tanav experienced, he added, has also been faced by two previous academy students, both involving potential drowning incidents. 
But saving someone's life was far beyond Tanav's thinking as sat in his seat watching a movie on his laptop, on a flight back from Miami with his family after having been on a cruise vacation. 
Over the volume of the movie in his earplugs, Tanav suddenly heard screaming sounds coming from a few rows behind him, and his training instincts kicked in. 
"I heard the child screaming and I jumped out of my seat into the aisle and made my back a few rows to where a mother was screaming about her child choking on something," Tanav recalled. 
With the mother's blessing, Tanav began applying pressure at different points of the child's body to try and force the source of the blockage, which turned out to be a piece of food, from his airway and allowed him to breathe again. 
"When I began applying pressure he was changing colour to purple because he couldn't breathe," Tanav recalled. 
"At that moment, all I could hear was my heart racing and I was really nervous," noting that's when the training he had received kicked in for what to do. 
After the child was revived, Tanav said he sat with him for a while to make sure he was okay. 
Tanav said he was appreciative for having the skills taught to him to respond in that situation, saying the Lifeguard Academy, has taught him "to learn new things I like," able to spend up to nine hours a week in the pool and working on live simulations to learn how to transfer injured or drowning swimmers to safety. 
On Thursday at the H2O Aquatic Centre, while talking with local media about his story, lifeguards carried out a real extraction from the wave pool section of the aquatic centre, which all the academy students watched be carried out with organized precision. 
"It's not very often in training that you actually get to see a live rescue be carried out," McNabb said. 
He started the Lifeguard Academy in the 2018-19 school year for Grade 10-12 students at RSS. So far, the program has graduated more than 80 students, with 15 of those students having found jobs lifeguarding at the Y. 
McNabb said he was moving from Surrey to Kelowna to teach math and physics at RSS.
When being interviewed by principal Hugh Alexander, he noted that McNabb had a background in aquatics. 
"He asked me how would I like to head up a new Lifeguard Academy at the school and I said sure," he recalled. 
"It was because of Hugh and the support of the school district that this program exists."
Beyond the self-confidence growth and knowledge passed on to academy students, many graduates in Grade 12 are certified to work as lifeguards, one of many professions where a labour shortage exists. 
Like Tanav, many see opportunities in their lives to pursue that career option, with the potential to earn up to $3,000 a month.
"It is a satisfying feeling to walk into the Okanagan Family Y and look out at the pool area and see it staffed by lifeguards who all came out of our academy program," McNabb said. 
For Tanav, lifeguard training has shown him a pathway to get more involved in his community and pursue a career option he is very excited to pursue.