How to Save a Pool

So you remember my cousin TJ, right? The one who flings cats into pools to see if they can swim?

Well, he asked me recently if I’d feel comfortable using my blog to publicize a fund-raising event he’s involved with to renovate and re-open a pool in his northern Colorado community. And I said, “Heck, yes! There are days I debate using this blog to sell my children if I thought I could get away with it.” So helping my cousin do something that’s both legal and would benefit his community is a no-brainer.

And, almost even better, is the fact that the way TJ and his Loveland Swim Club compadres are raising money is crazy. Not like a little crazy. Like a lot crazy. They aim to get 3,942 individuals to each swim one length of a 25-yard pool in relay fashion in 24 hours or less (that’s an average split of 21.92 seconds per leg of this erstwhile relay).

Why 3,942? Because in January, 3,941 South Africans did it, and thereby got themselves into the Guinness World Book of Records (TJ’s a little fuzzy on the yards/meters differential, but he says their short-course yards pool fits the criterion). Anyway, if the community of Loveland can get this record back, I think it would do a lot to erase the sting of that 2004 Olympic victory by the South African men’s 400 free relay.

That plus it would help raise money to renovate the Loveland High School pool which has been shut down since 2002 when some authoritative agency deemed it “unsafe” because of its age and condition.

The Loveland High School pool was built in 1965. I would love to walk this authoritative agency through Mr. Coach’s current facility which was built in 1954. This should be its last year because the walls are going up, even as I type, on the new natatorium.

But a few missing tiles, a sinking foundation and a roof that lets in more air (and rain) than the actual ventilation system are no reason -- at least in our town -- to shut down a 55-year-old pool before a new one is built. Heck, there’s this one faculty member’s wife here who was complaining recently that she won’t swim in the current pool because the environment there is “completely toxic.” All of us who use the facility on a regular basis were like, “…and your point would be?”

(Actually I should never complain about people who refuse to swim in the current pool. Less people = more lane space for me.)

But in Loveland, they would probably love (no pun intended) to have too many people in a lane if it means they’ve gotten this particular pool renovated and back up to code. So what can you do to help? Well, if you’re within shouting distance of Loveland, fire up the snowmobile and get yourself over there to swim your length on the weekend of Nov. 6-7 at Mountain View High School’s pool. Conversely, if you’re already snowed in for the winter, then consider making a donation to this worthy cause.

For all the information you will ever need about this event, you can visit Loveland’s Web site. Tell ‘em TJ’s most fabulous cousin sent you.

Incidentally, the photos here were taken in our current facility by Marisa Obuchowski, one of Mr. Coach’s student-athletes, for a photography class. Isn’t it amazing how beautiful crumbling concrete and rusting radiators can look at the right shutter speed?

To Breathe or Not to Breathe

With Olympic swimmer Natalie Coughlin’s participation on the TV dance competition “Dancing with the Stars,” a certain touchy subject has reared its head in the Coach Family household. And that would be breathing.

Apparently Natalie has problems remembering to breathe when she dances because she has spent most of her life reaping the rewards that go with not breathing. That’s because in swimming, when the going gets tough, the tough stop breathing.

Now those who are familiar with my heroic attempts to become a better swimmer know that I initially went into this swimming thing thinking that with my background in running, two of my most transferrable assets would be my lungs and my legs. As it turns it out, my best asset has been my cheerful disposition.

To be fair, I have made my peace with the kicking thing. Despite the handicap presented by my tragically narrow feet, I do not suck at kicking. And Mr. Coach has been extremely prudent to credit my genes for our kids’ excellent kicking cadences (they got his gun-boat feet, though).

But the breathing. Oy. I’m better than I was when I started but I still can’t comfortably breathe on both sides (unless I’m swimming with my pull buoy, Rodrigo – what? You don’t name your pull buoy, too?). Anyway, it’s better but I still can’t do an underwater 25, let alone a 50.

But everywhere I look with swimming, it’s all about cutting off the oxygen supply. Parents of football players may worry about the effects that repeated blows to the head will have on their children. I worry about the lack of oxygen.

My son, Little Mr. Coach, has great affection for one particular drill that he and his age-group buddies do. They call it a “bat hang.” They hook their legs over the pool gutter then lean backwards into the water and hang there, upside down and holding their breath in increasing increments of time. Like bats, hanging from a rafter. Except this rafter hangs over water and the bats aren’t breathing.

I sometimes cover family-court cases for my newspaper. If a parent did something like that to a kid at home, you can be sure the judge would have that kid in foster care by sundown. But within the context of a swimming pool, it’s all good!

So the next time the judges hassle Natalie about not breathing, I almost wish I could drag them to a pool and make them do bat hangs. If they’re not going to give her a 10 on dance merit alone, then a bat hang or two might shake a sympathy 10 loose.

Coaching Girls vs. Boys, Round 3

Here is an anecdote which I think pretty much says it all about the sports-based differences between girls and boys. (You may recall this is a topic I have plumbed before, and those two blogs – here and here – are the ones that people return to most often on this site, according to my site traffic reports. Go figure.)

Anyway, the anecdote: Mr. Coach came home the other evening, proud to report that he had beat up good on the team that day. In fact he had beat up on them so good that afterwards, he said, he found one of the guys sitting in the shower eating an ear of corn.

Now a guy might read that and say, “Mmm, corn on the cob, that’s a good idea.”

Whereas a girl -- which is what I am -- would hear it and say, “People eat in the shower!?”

And a girl like me would be even more stunned to hear Mr. Coach reply, “Yeah. Guys eat in the shower all the time. What do girls do?”

To which I said, “Shower?”

And even that isn’t exactly true because -- and ladies, feel free to back me up on this -- a lot of women don’t shower in public after their athletic workouts. They will go home to their dorms, apartments or houses with that flesh-eating layer of chlorine or grime on their skin and shower up in private. And even if you do shower in public, there’s not a whole lot of social interaction that occurs. Women may be champs at multi-tasking, but in the shower, we tend to be very purpose-driven.

But apparently there’s a whole other branch of the food-service industry going on in men’s showers. Now I knew about chairs being dragged in, because I had heard about that years ago (again, never seen it happen in a women’s shower and probably never will), but I never realized the chairs are sometimes there to accommodate food consumption.

But corn on the cob? Now, to be fair, Mr. Coach said that was a first for him, too. Usually, he says, it’s things like apples, bananas and granola bars, but an ear of corn is a food choice he applauds (mostly because he really likes corn, too).

However I hear that and I’m thinking this wasn’t like a random “open the fridge and eat the first thing you see” food choice. This took planning. And transportation. And then storage for a few hours in -- what? A locker that hasn’t been disinfected since the Roosevelt administration. The first one.

So to sum things up here:

Girl + shower + corn on the cob = No. Just no.

Guy + shower + corn on the cob = Where can I get me some of that?

Lane Matters

Aristotle was onto something when he started categorizing the hoo-ha out of every living and non-living thing. It’s only human nature to assign ourselves categories and if you need proof of that, all you have to do is look at a swim practice. The urge to sort themselves out by lane is primal with swimmers. You have these nice little slots to put yourselves in, so naturally you put some effort into deciding who goes in what slot and why.

Now, granted, most of the time it’s the coaches who decide who goes where. But for warmups, warmdowns and less structured workouts where you can choose your own lanemates, this is serious stuff. It’s like picking a fraternity or a sorority, except the workouts make it seem like the hazing never ends.

Lane selection can be competitive, sometimes even judgmental, and a certain type of prejudice called “lane-ism” can develop. I know of some high-school teams in the area who get rather hoity-toity about who gets shunted to the outside, slower lanes. To be a “Lane Sixer,” in one team’s lexicon, is a terrible thing. I don’t know, but if I were them I’d be afraid of the kids in those outside lanes. I’ve usually found the outside-lane dwellers to be intelligent and sarcastic. Show me a bright smart aleck who has found a reason to work hard at a sport they never win at, and I’ll show you someone who’s going to be signing Lane Three’s paychecks some day.

But with Mr. Coach’s teams, I’ve noticed that the swimmers mostly sort themselves out by communication patterns. Gloomy whiners (the “Eeyores, ” we call them) like to whine to each other. Dumb-joke specialists flock together and are ignored by the lanes on either side. Chirpy Pollyanna types are happiest together and no-nonsense masochists (often your distance swimmers) are unhappiest together. And Mr. Coach has identified a subspecies he calls the “Meek Tweezlies” who go wherever the Alpha Males or Females in their lives tell them to go.

Many lanemates develop bonds outside the pool as well. One group of Lane Four swimmers, past and present, will go out to dinner at local restaurants together and apparently are quite strict about not letting non-Lane-Four types dine with them on these occasions. Another recent group dubbed themselves “Lane Fun” and they’ve been quite aggressive with the recruiting. But that’s OK because they help each other create a happy water home.

The only type of lane you don’t like to see form is a Loveboat Lane because that always ends up being more like a Titanic Lane. Nothing sinks an aquatic romance faster than sloppy kickboard skills and fart bubbles. So if your coach tells you that you can’t swim with your GF or BF, just say thank you and go find yourself another lane. You’ve got plenty of options.

Archie

Last weekend, Mr. Coach had to make a choice: He could either attend the American Swimming Coaches Association World Clinic in Ft. Lauderdale or head back to his alma mater, Illinois State University, to attend a men’s swimming and diving team reunion to honor their old coach. It was a no-brainer.

(Besides, he’s done South Florida in late summer before. Nobody needs to do that twice unless they’re trying to lose weight from sweating.)

So Mr. Coach talked Little Mr. Coach and me into coming along with him, and we had a jolly time of it. There’s nothing like walking into a room full of balding or gray-haired guys and being able to still see exactly what kind of people they were back when they fit Size 28 Speedos.

Even scarier is asking someone what their event was and their answer is pretty much exactly what you would have guessed. 200 fly guys have a pensive look to them, like they’re still looking for the wall. Backstrokers are wired kind of loose, although a couple I met had swerved in a more introspective direction. Divers – still neatly tucked and pressed. Sprinters – still loopy as all get out. Interestingly I didn’t encounter any breaststrokers, which I guess means they’ve either become hermits or have a short life span.

The reason why the group was balding or graying was simple: The ISU men’s swimming and diving program was among the earliest casualties of the misapplication of Title IX. Though the Act of Congress indisputably created much-needed opportunities for female athletes in the U.S., unfortunately some schools chose (and still choose) to balance out their male and female athlete numbers by cutting sports like men’s swimming, diving, gymnastics and wrestling. ISU lopped off all of those in the early 1980s.

But these guys weren’t there to dwell on that, which is admirable. They were there to honor their old coach with equal parts affection and insults. You’d have to know their old coach to understand why. And a lot of people do.

Archie Harris is a well-known figure in U.S. and college swimming. If you don’t know him from when he swam, you know him from when he coached. If you don’t know him from his amazing work with the Easter Seals Foundation, then you know him as one of the tall old guys who have run the College Swim Coaches Forum in Ft. Lauderdale each winter for the last 128 years. Archie wasn’t the tallest of the Old Farts (as Mr. Coach affectionately and bravely dubbed them), but he was easily the loudest. And they all have an unerring sense for figuring out who the most authority-fearing and nervous member of a team is – and then going after them for imaginary infractions. They tried getting me once for bringing a glass juice bottle into the facility. OK, they were right, but they didn’t have to be so loud about it.

Archie is 86 now and he (and his wife Harriet) retired from running the Clinic about three years ago. My husband was very keen to have our son meet one of the most pivotal people in his own coaching journey. On the first night of the reunion, we gathered for a social at a hotel. Mr. Coach introduced our son to Archie who gently held his elbow and pulled him close.

“Do you say your prayers every night, young man?” Archie asked our son. And I got a little tear in my eye, watching my son nod nervously and I thought with just a hint of melancholy, “Oh dear, Archie’s finally gone soft around the edges.”

“That’s good,” Archie told him and he pulled him in even closer.

“Tonight,” he said, “when you say your prayers…I want you to get down on your knees and thank the Lord…that you take after your mother.”

Now, I ask you -- who would not want to swim for a guy like that?

Lifeguard Cert

I realize that, north of the Equator at least, I’m a little off-season with a blog about lifeguard certification. Most people get certified in the spring before the high-demand outdoor summer season begins. But we recently made Little Miss Coach get certified, so it’s still fresh in my mind.

The critical verb there is “made” because, while I know my daughter appreciates the opportunity to earn money for herself, the reality is Mr. Coach and I have been waiting for the day when we could have our own personal lifeguard. We’re not the first parents in our university community to do this. There are others who’ve gotten their kids certified for the express purpose of having a backup lifeguard for those days when the assigned lifeguard doesn’t show up. At a small pool with a small community of daily swimmers, it happens. But there’s nothing like being able to say, “Oh, I’ll just call Herbert and get him over here. He’s only sleeping.” And then, about 15 minutes later, you get in to swim while surly Herbert sits and watches and prays that his dad goes under just so he can not rescue him.

And now we can do the same thing to Little Miss Coach! For her certification, she got tag-team taught by her father and his assistant coach who are both Red Cross certified lifeguard instructors. Boy, was she psyched!

And she should be. Mr. Coach is very highly regarded in local lifeguard-certification circles, and most especially for his victim skills. As part of the certification process, the would-be lifeguards have to jump in and rescue drowning victims. Mr. Coach has two specialties: One is the Victim Who Doesn’t Float and the other is the Victim Who Fights Back.

Both “victimizations” are brilliant, but other instructors don’t like to bring Mr. Coach in for just any group of would-be lifeguards. That would be like using a howitzer to go bird shooting. No, rather, they tend to hold him in reserve for their big strapping college guys (and a few gals) who are going for the open-water lifeguarding jobs where they’re more likely to encounter difficult victims.

Your municipal and country-club pool guards might encounter a modified version of either the dead-weight victim who goes right to the bottom or the spastic-meltdown victim who could break your nose in a panic. But for the most part, they’re only going to be dealing with unsupervised 5-year-olds in the deep end.

In the open-water situations, that’s where a guard could go down with the victim if he or she can’t maintain control of the situation. So if a guard can get past Mr. Coach, you can rest assured they can wrangle in a drunken 27-year-old who can’t swim but decided to wade out over his head to retrieve a Frisbee.

But, for lack of any other victims this time, Mr. Coach was deployed on his own daughter. He decided to go with the Victim Who Doesn’t Float which I thought was an audacious choice, given that Little Miss Coach barely cracks 100 pounds on the scale. However I can understand the logic: Her skull is just as titanium-hard as his and the two of them have given each other black eyes before with accidental head butts. A Victim Who Fights Back would just be asking for another black eye.

So she brought in her dead-weight father without mishap, earned her lifeguard card, and now will be at our lap-swim beck and call. Who said parenthood was all give and no take? Certainly not us!

D3

Division III (a.k.a. "D3") swimming is a breed unto itself. For those not familiar with this term, it refers to a particular category of U.S. universities under the umbrella of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (or “NCAA” to those in the know… “NCs” if you want make it sound like you’re a college sports veteran.)

Anyway, the NCAA is divided into three divisions: Division I schools tend to be larger universities and, as long as they have the money (an increasingly shaky assumption), they can give out sports scholarships. Division II schools tend to be smaller public universities and they also can give out sports scholarship money, though not as much.

Division III is what I call the “Chariots of Fire” division: Its founding philosophy derives from ye not-so-olde days when sport was viewed as a lovely part of a well-rounded lifestyle for which monetary compensation was viewed with disdain (like in the movie “Chariots of Fire”). Where a student-athlete spent his or her day developing a research project to restructure a small East Asian nation’s debt load, completing a vigorous workout in the pool while discussing Emily Dickinson’s mid-career poetry between sets with the other sprinters, and then dining with local dignitaries on oysters, terrapin soup and roast duckling, whilst using the correct utensils.

There also used to be a requirement that coaches of Division III teams had to be academic professors. That died out a couple of decades ago, though there are a few genuine professor/coaches left, including Mr. Coach.

Division III as originally designed was a lovely sepia-toned vision of "mens sana in corpore sano” (that’s Latin for “a sound mind in a sound body”). But “D3” has pretty much gone Technicolor and High-Definition now in its pursuit of “citius, altius, fortius” (that’s Olympic Latin for “swifter, higher, stronger”). Consequently we’re left with a division that is peppered with programs where athlete-students don’t have the time to do anything other than eat, sleep, swim and attend a few classes.

But not all of them are like this. There are still a few Division III programs where you get an intriguing mix of overachievers who are determined to cram everything into their days they possibly can…and then some. About this time of the year is when Mr. Coach finds himself having many, many discussions about time management with his young charges.

“Do you think I can take four science labs this semester, Coach?” one will ask him as they sit in his office.

“Only if your goal is to have a nervous breakdown by Halloween,” Mr. Coach will reply.

“But only one of them overlaps with practice on Wednesdays.”

“Even if you weren’t swimming, you wouldn’t take four labs in one semester,” Mr. Coach points out. “If you do, then I have to notify Counseling Services.”

“OK,” the student-athlete will pause and reconsider. “How about three labs, one Habitat for Humanity house-building project on Sunday afternoons, and the first bassoon seat in the university orchestra?”

That’s when Mr. Coach reaches for the can of wasabi peas in his top drawer. It’s not easy, but somebody has to coach these kids.