The Swim Coach from Hell
Coaches for most kids’ sports in Newfoundland are usually volunteers. But competitive swim clubs often have salaried coaches. Sometimes those people have ancillary jobs like managing a city swimming pool, teaching, etc., but it is rare to find someone who is a full-time coach only.
At one point in our kids’ swimming careers I found myself president of our club, The Western Sharks. Shortly before I was elected the club had hired a new coach from Ontario who some, sadly, thought would produce a batch of Olympians. For those who have been involved in children’s sports, music, etc.---anything that includes competitions, you have no doubt witnessed that kind of hopeful hopelessness.
We had had nothing but problems with this coach from the day he arrived and myself and our club vice-president spent every other evening on the telephone trying to solve some problem or another that was affecting parents and swimmers. The final straw for me occurred during a regular Executive meeting. The coach had insisted a swimmer be banned from riding on the team bus to a swim meet 600 kms away due to a dispute he was having with the kid’s mother. After a heated discussion I told him firmly that the kid would have a seat on the bus alongside his teammates. His response was that if the kid was on the bus he would resign as coach. My immediate answer was “I’ll accept that.” When I looked around the table, one by one, everyone agreed with me. So that coach was history.
At that point, after two years of it, I had had enough as president as well, so stepped aside for a new person to helm the club, and hoped for the best as we searched for a new coach.
It wasn’t long before one was found. Once again he was someone from “off-island”---a “Come From Away” from Ontario, who parents of our best swimmers were sure would prove to be better qualified than any local individual to produce a batch of Olympians.
On the evening the club’s Executive got together to discuss the applicant, organize reference checks, and so on, I was included as the outgoing president. The new president made an impassioned plea to hire the guy, stating that unless we didn’t offer him the job right away we would lose him to another club elsewhere in Canada. His credentials were indeed impressive, having coached an Olympic gold medalist decades before and coached Canadian swimmers internationally on a couple of occasions, although that had been decades ago as well.
When the meeting was over I told the new president that we should do the reference checks the next day so we could move forward with the hire, and if everything turned out to be okay regarding those essential checks, we could offer him the job that same day.
His response was “That’s already been done.”
“What?” I said.
Jesus. No reference checks? Just a hire via telephone by the new president? Shit. Here we go again I thought.
Enough of the senior swimmers’ parents were in favor of the hire, and even though it had been done unethically and probably illegally, we had a new head coach who arrived in Corner Brook within the week. I wondered how long ago the job had actually been offered to the guy.
A meeting was called for all parents so the new Executive could introduce the coach. He was well-prepared---charming, confident, humorous and he certainly came across as a real professional, albeit one who was pretty full of himself. When he found out I had been the president of the club for the previous two years he asked for any correspondence and/or records and information I might have that could help him get started. I did have some so I suggested we go for coffee the next day.
At that coffee get-together I handed him the notes and files, and filled him in on the problems and complications we had had with the previous coach---physical and mental abuse, inappropriate comments and behaviour towards young swimmers, difficulties with parents, etc. I could see that he was becoming increasingly uneasy as I calmly outlined the craziness we had dealt with over the previous two years. And what, in my opinion, clearly made him uncomfortable, were my final words that day.
I told him that I didn’t believe in parents interfering with coaches and their coaching philosophies or methodologies, and that he would never hear from me regarding those points. However, based on the grief I had dealt with over the previous two years, I made it clear that if a coach was abusing swimmers in any way I would be his worst enemy. Finally I told him that my daughter, who was slated to be coached by him alongside other senior swimmers, was cooperative, respectful and worked hard, and I wished him luck.
I watched as he seemed to stomp off down the street, swinging his briefcase in ridiculous arcs and looking around wildly at nothing in particular. At that point I was pretty sure the hire had been a mistake. Turns out I was right.
Almost immediately he began berating swimmers. He laid into the star swimmer on the team after about a week of practices, screaming at him, calling him names and asking him over and over if he was satisfied just being a Newfoundland champion rather than striving to be a Canadian champion, while the kid sat on a starting block hanging his head. The swimmer was 13 years old. His mother seemed to think this was acceptable coaching and by humiliating an athlete you could kick-start them into having greater performances. This is a stupid, dated coaching strategy that, increasingly, is being replaced by more supportive methods. Today I think the “tough guy” approach is mostly found in the sports of football and hockey. In the seriously tough sport of boxing, if a coach or trainer psychologically abused an athlete like that and undermined their confidence, they could end up getting killed in the ring.
An example of a positive approach to coaching would include the greatest swim coach of all time, George Haines, who, instead of penalizing his swimmers if they missed a practice, used to tell them that they didn’t have to attend practices if they didn’t feel like it. As a result, attendance among his athletes was near perfect.
Young competitive swimmers normally have two practices a day for five or six days a week--one in the morning before school and a longer session after school and before supper time in the evening. I used to drop my daughter and, later, my son and daughter, at early morning practice, go home and make them breakfast and return to pick them up for school with hot breakfasts on paper plates that we’d eat in the car.
One morning I arrived at the pool near the end of a morning workout and so climbed the stairs to a viewing area above the pool to watch along with some other parents who were always there.
When I got near the viewing window I could see all the swimmers standing in the water near the starting blocks, looking towards the side deck. I couldn’t see what was going on but it looked a bit strange as some of the swimmers appeared to be frightened. They all looked pretty poker-faced, pretty sober.
Later I found out that our new coach had pulled Maggie out of the pool to demonstrate some kind of stretching technique on her. As a result he pulled her arms back over her head until she burst out crying, then sent all the swimmers except Maggie back into the pool and berated her for crying in front of her teammates. She was 11 years old.
Meanwhile, and without knowing what had happened, I headed down the steps to wait for Maggie to get changed for school, and encountered the coach as he was walking towards the exit door.
“Good morning” I said.
“Good morning”, he replied as he walked past me. He took about six steps and then turned and walked back towards me. Then he snarled loudly through his teeth:
“You told me your daughter was cooperative and worked hard. That’s a complete lie. I just want you to know your daughter isn’t the perfect little angel you think she is.”
And he whirled around and walked away.
I stood there, dumfounded, for a minute or so, then walked back to the stairs where I sat down hard and thought about what had transpired, finally saying to myself “I’m not fucking paying for this.”
When Maggie came out of the changing room I could see she was distressed. A couple of parents who had a better view of the swim deck than I did said they didn’t think what had happened was right and couldn’t understand why it had occurred.
But I knew why it had occurred.
After the earlier meeting over coffee it was clear to this coach that he had a parent who would not put up with any nonsense, who might disrupt his cult-like coaching style and persona, and what better way to get rid of a parent like that than to abuse his child.
That night Charlotte and I got the whole story of what had happened. I told Maggie and Cary that that was the end of our association with the swim club and that we would make other arrangements for training if they wanted to swim competitively.
When it was bedtime Maggie went to her room quietly but it wasn’t long before we heard her crying. When we went to her room she was sitting on the floor surrounded by her cache of medals and ribbons from four years of competitions.
She said “Dad, I don’t care what he does to me. I just want to keep swimming.”
God…what an epiphany---his strategy. You get into someone’s brain (in this case an 11 year old girl’s brain), you berate, humiliate and abuse them until they are shells and ready for you to program them with your controlling personal agenda. Just like a cult leader does. Just like a pimp does.
I don’t recall ever being so angry in all my life. So I got to work.
I contacted two swim club presidents in Ontario where this guy had been head coach for the previous two years.
One fellow told me he been an absolute nightmare of a coach for his club and outlined a number of issues that had caused parents and swimmers to quit the club. His remedy started with him volunteering to be president of his club. Over the phone he said to me “Look, I won’t tell you what I do for a living but I make a lot of money, and I’m not afraid of anybody. So I re-wrote his job description and handed it to him in the parking lot. As a result he resigned and we moved on.”
Another club’s president told me this coach had been such an abusive jerk that half the team quit, including her own daughter, who had a promising national-level career as a swimmer. Since he was on a one-year contract, the club didn’t renew it and he was gone from there.
Our next move was to find someone who could coach, semi-coach or instruct Maggie and Cary for the next few weeks. Fortunately a retired coach and her husband lived in Corner Brook and swam regularly at the adult swim times that were scheduled at one of our two city pools. They had both been competitive swimmers in their home country in Eastern Europe, and the husband had been an Olympian. Camilla, the retired coach, had recommended Maggie for a trophy three years earlier as the most promising new female swimmer so she was happy to help. So training, although limited, ensued.
Meanwhile the remainder of the team soldiered on with swimmers refusing to attend workouts, pleading with their parents to let them quit, and some quitting outright based on the erratic, abusive behavior of this guy.
A provincial meet had been scheduled for Mount Pearl, a community 650 kms away on the east side of the island and eight or nine clubs had signed on. But for some reason the coach decided The Western Sharks would not attend. But together, Maggie, Cary, Charlotte and I decided that Maggie and Cary would attend. We organized for both of them to swim under the supervision of another club’s coach. We travelled to the meet, which took place over two and a half days, just before Christmas. While we were there some parents had called a meeting back in Corner Brook to see what to do about the current situation and had gathered at the house of Elton and Susan Hughes, an Australian couple who moved to Corner Brook on a four year contract as physicians, and who had two kids on the team.
Maggie and Cary did well at the Mount Pearl meet. Both of them won medals and improved their times. Maggie was awarded “Top Achiever” status in her age group. We phoned the Hughes’ to let people know and by the time we returned they had decided to establish a new swim club. No one needed an abusive jerk to goad their children into going faster in the pool.
When the Christmas season had ended, on the 5th of January, 1999, I watched 11 swimmers walk onto the deck of the Arts and Culture pool in Corner Brook and dive into the water. By March of that year, thanks to a charismatic young coach named Dion---from right here in Newfoundland---there were over a hundred swimmers on our new team. And for four years the West Side Heat won award after award at meets across Newfoundland and in Nova Scotia, and qualified several swimmers annually for The Nationals over three years in Calgary, Winnipeg and Toronto.
Meanwhile The Sharks carried on for the rest of the season with remaining and dwindling numbers, then this nightmare coach left town to helm yet another club in Ontario. He lasted there one year.
© Kent Jones 2019
Coaches for most kids’ sports in Newfoundland are usually volunteers. But competitive swim clubs often have salaried coaches. Sometimes those people have ancillary jobs like managing a city swimming pool, teaching, etc., but it is rare to find someone who is a full-time coach only.
At one point in our kids’ swimming careers I found myself president of our club, The Western Sharks. Shortly before I was elected the club had hired a new coach from Ontario who some, sadly, thought would produce a batch of Olympians. For those who have been involved in children’s sports, music, etc.---anything that includes competitions, you have no doubt witnessed that kind of hopeful hopelessness.
We had had nothing but problems with this coach from the day he arrived and myself and our club vice-president spent every other evening on the telephone trying to solve some problem or another that was affecting parents and swimmers. The final straw for me occurred during a regular Executive meeting. The coach had insisted a swimmer be banned from riding on the team bus to a swim meet 600 kms away due to a dispute he was having with the kid’s mother. After a heated discussion I told him firmly that the kid would have a seat on the bus alongside his teammates. His response was that if the kid was on the bus he would resign as coach. My immediate answer was “I’ll accept that.” When I looked around the table, one by one, everyone agreed with me. So that coach was history.
At that point, after two years of it, I had had enough as president as well, so stepped aside for a new person to helm the club, and hoped for the best as we searched for a new coach.
It wasn’t long before one was found. Once again he was someone from “off-island”---a “Come From Away” from Ontario, who parents of our best swimmers were sure would prove to be better qualified than any local individual to produce a batch of Olympians.
On the evening the club’s Executive got together to discuss the applicant, organize reference checks, and so on, I was included as the outgoing president. The new president made an impassioned plea to hire the guy, stating that unless we didn’t offer him the job right away we would lose him to another club elsewhere in Canada. His credentials were indeed impressive, having coached an Olympic gold medalist decades before and coached Canadian swimmers internationally on a couple of occasions, although that had been decades ago as well.
When the meeting was over I told the new president that we should do the reference checks the next day so we could move forward with the hire, and if everything turned out to be okay regarding those essential checks, we could offer him the job that same day.
His response was “That’s already been done.”
“What?” I said.
Jesus. No reference checks? Just a hire via telephone by the new president? Shit. Here we go again I thought.
Enough of the senior swimmers’ parents were in favor of the hire, and even though it had been done unethically and probably illegally, we had a new head coach who arrived in Corner Brook within the week. I wondered how long ago the job had actually been offered to the guy.
A meeting was called for all parents so the new Executive could introduce the coach. He was well-prepared---charming, confident, humorous and he certainly came across as a real professional, albeit one who was pretty full of himself. When he found out I had been the president of the club for the previous two years he asked for any correspondence and/or records and information I might have that could help him get started. I did have some so I suggested we go for coffee the next day.
At that coffee get-together I handed him the notes and files, and filled him in on the problems and complications we had had with the previous coach---physical and mental abuse, inappropriate comments and behaviour towards young swimmers, difficulties with parents, etc. I could see that he was becoming increasingly uneasy as I calmly outlined the craziness we had dealt with over the previous two years. And what, in my opinion, clearly made him uncomfortable, were my final words that day.
I told him that I didn’t believe in parents interfering with coaches and their coaching philosophies or methodologies, and that he would never hear from me regarding those points. However, based on the grief I had dealt with over the previous two years, I made it clear that if a coach was abusing swimmers in any way I would be his worst enemy. Finally I told him that my daughter, who was slated to be coached by him alongside other senior swimmers, was cooperative, respectful and worked hard, and I wished him luck.
I watched as he seemed to stomp off down the street, swinging his briefcase in ridiculous arcs and looking around wildly at nothing in particular. At that point I was pretty sure the hire had been a mistake. Turns out I was right.
Almost immediately he began berating swimmers. He laid into the star swimmer on the team after about a week of practices, screaming at him, calling him names and asking him over and over if he was satisfied just being a Newfoundland champion rather than striving to be a Canadian champion, while the kid sat on a starting block hanging his head. The swimmer was 13 years old. His mother seemed to think this was acceptable coaching and by humiliating an athlete you could kick-start them into having greater performances. This is a stupid, dated coaching strategy that, increasingly, is being replaced by more supportive methods. Today I think the “tough guy” approach is mostly found in the sports of football and hockey. In the seriously tough sport of boxing, if a coach or trainer psychologically abused an athlete like that and undermined their confidence, they could end up getting killed in the ring.
An example of a positive approach to coaching would include the greatest swim coach of all time, George Haines, who, instead of penalizing his swimmers if they missed a practice, used to tell them that they didn’t have to attend practices if they didn’t feel like it. As a result, attendance among his athletes was near perfect.
Young competitive swimmers normally have two practices a day for five or six days a week--one in the morning before school and a longer session after school and before supper time in the evening. I used to drop my daughter and, later, my son and daughter, at early morning practice, go home and make them breakfast and return to pick them up for school with hot breakfasts on paper plates that we’d eat in the car.
One morning I arrived at the pool near the end of a morning workout and so climbed the stairs to a viewing area above the pool to watch along with some other parents who were always there.
When I got near the viewing window I could see all the swimmers standing in the water near the starting blocks, looking towards the side deck. I couldn’t see what was going on but it looked a bit strange as some of the swimmers appeared to be frightened. They all looked pretty poker-faced, pretty sober.
Later I found out that our new coach had pulled Maggie out of the pool to demonstrate some kind of stretching technique on her. As a result he pulled her arms back over her head until she burst out crying, then sent all the swimmers except Maggie back into the pool and berated her for crying in front of her teammates. She was 11 years old.
Meanwhile, and without knowing what had happened, I headed down the steps to wait for Maggie to get changed for school, and encountered the coach as he was walking towards the exit door.
“Good morning” I said.
“Good morning”, he replied as he walked past me. He took about six steps and then turned and walked back towards me. Then he snarled loudly through his teeth:
“You told me your daughter was cooperative and worked hard. That’s a complete lie. I just want you to know your daughter isn’t the perfect little angel you think she is.”
And he whirled around and walked away.
I stood there, dumfounded, for a minute or so, then walked back to the stairs where I sat down hard and thought about what had transpired, finally saying to myself “I’m not fucking paying for this.”
When Maggie came out of the changing room I could see she was distressed. A couple of parents who had a better view of the swim deck than I did said they didn’t think what had happened was right and couldn’t understand why it had occurred.
But I knew why it had occurred.
After the earlier meeting over coffee it was clear to this coach that he had a parent who would not put up with any nonsense, who might disrupt his cult-like coaching style and persona, and what better way to get rid of a parent like that than to abuse his child.
That night Charlotte and I got the whole story of what had happened. I told Maggie and Cary that that was the end of our association with the swim club and that we would make other arrangements for training if they wanted to swim competitively.
When it was bedtime Maggie went to her room quietly but it wasn’t long before we heard her crying. When we went to her room she was sitting on the floor surrounded by her cache of medals and ribbons from four years of competitions.
She said “Dad, I don’t care what he does to me. I just want to keep swimming.”
God…what an epiphany---his strategy. You get into someone’s brain (in this case an 11 year old girl’s brain), you berate, humiliate and abuse them until they are shells and ready for you to program them with your controlling personal agenda. Just like a cult leader does. Just like a pimp does.
I don’t recall ever being so angry in all my life. So I got to work.
I contacted two swim club presidents in Ontario where this guy had been head coach for the previous two years.
One fellow told me he been an absolute nightmare of a coach for his club and outlined a number of issues that had caused parents and swimmers to quit the club. His remedy started with him volunteering to be president of his club. Over the phone he said to me “Look, I won’t tell you what I do for a living but I make a lot of money, and I’m not afraid of anybody. So I re-wrote his job description and handed it to him in the parking lot. As a result he resigned and we moved on.”
Another club’s president told me this coach had been such an abusive jerk that half the team quit, including her own daughter, who had a promising national-level career as a swimmer. Since he was on a one-year contract, the club didn’t renew it and he was gone from there.
Our next move was to find someone who could coach, semi-coach or instruct Maggie and Cary for the next few weeks. Fortunately a retired coach and her husband lived in Corner Brook and swam regularly at the adult swim times that were scheduled at one of our two city pools. They had both been competitive swimmers in their home country in Eastern Europe, and the husband had been an Olympian. Camilla, the retired coach, had recommended Maggie for a trophy three years earlier as the most promising new female swimmer so she was happy to help. So training, although limited, ensued.
Meanwhile the remainder of the team soldiered on with swimmers refusing to attend workouts, pleading with their parents to let them quit, and some quitting outright based on the erratic, abusive behavior of this guy.
A provincial meet had been scheduled for Mount Pearl, a community 650 kms away on the east side of the island and eight or nine clubs had signed on. But for some reason the coach decided The Western Sharks would not attend. But together, Maggie, Cary, Charlotte and I decided that Maggie and Cary would attend. We organized for both of them to swim under the supervision of another club’s coach. We travelled to the meet, which took place over two and a half days, just before Christmas. While we were there some parents had called a meeting back in Corner Brook to see what to do about the current situation and had gathered at the house of Elton and Susan Hughes, an Australian couple who moved to Corner Brook on a four year contract as physicians, and who had two kids on the team.
Maggie and Cary did well at the Mount Pearl meet. Both of them won medals and improved their times. Maggie was awarded “Top Achiever” status in her age group. We phoned the Hughes’ to let people know and by the time we returned they had decided to establish a new swim club. No one needed an abusive jerk to goad their children into going faster in the pool.
When the Christmas season had ended, on the 5th of January, 1999, I watched 11 swimmers walk onto the deck of the Arts and Culture pool in Corner Brook and dive into the water. By March of that year, thanks to a charismatic young coach named Dion---from right here in Newfoundland---there were over a hundred swimmers on our new team. And for four years the West Side Heat won award after award at meets across Newfoundland and in Nova Scotia, and qualified several swimmers annually for The Nationals over three years in Calgary, Winnipeg and Toronto.
Meanwhile The Sharks carried on for the rest of the season with remaining and dwindling numbers, then this nightmare coach left town to helm yet another club in Ontario. He lasted there one year.
© Kent Jones 2019