How he made me feel. . .

Over the last weekend in September my Kenyon College Swimming and Diving teammates from the past 40 years or so gathered together to celebrate the career of the man who guided the program for most of those years.  Jim Steen amassed a record of national titles that no other coach in any sport in any division has even come close to duplicating.  Along the way there were other accolades, national records, NCAA post-graduate scholarships, titles, All-Americans, the list goes on and on.  I had the chance to give the "big man" a little trash talk at his celebration / roast.  Hope you enjoy.  

My name is Dave Hutchison and I’ve had the privilege of swimming for Coachman from 1989 – 1993.  

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to capture my feelings and thoughts about the big guy we’re honoring tonight.  Assuming that someone has written it better than I could, I found this from Maya Angelou.  She writes, “I’ve learned that people forget what you said, people forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  In thinking about tonight, and our dear coachman, there is possibly no more appropriate statement to characterize his impact on my life and those who swam under his watch. 

But now that I've said it there might just be some things that he’s said that are worth remembering.  In fact I’ve gone to the trouble to categorize a few of them and I’ve been waiting for this opportunity to share with you all.

Let’s start with the Inaccurate

“If you can’t take the heat, get out of the fire” or you might find yourself

“out of the frying pan and into the kitchen…”

I ask, if you, finding yourself where Coachman is speaking and on a roll to 45 kids shivering in their speedos and wondering just how much practice might be shortened by this little treatise… would you raise your hand to correct him? 

The bizarre

“Amy can read my mind like a glove…”

Just how does one read a glove?  I’m still trying to wrap my mind around that one.

The Baffling

I don’t even care.  But if I did… which I do!

The Transcendent

“I can draw inspiration from a squirrel, you’re driving down the road when the squirrel runs out in front of you, he goes right, he goes left, what do you do?  You step on the gas… then you look back and you can say, “He made it! Allright!”

The practical

“Guys, you’ve got to go out there, get it up and keep it up… that’s the secret to a lot of things.” 

The Taoist!

“The only way to swim fast is to swim fast!” –to be fair I believe this was one he borrowed from Coach Sloan. 

Now come to think of it, I can still remember just one or two things he might have done to me and my teammates.  And in keeping with the theme of categories, 

Let’s start with the forgetful. 

I’m sure there’s a cadre of swimmers Coach appoints every 2 -3 years to be “his keepers,” in addition to his regular team including; Marcy, his children, and all of his assistants.  But for my last three years I was frequently employed to help him find his everyday belongings.  I distinctly remember coming up with a clutch find when his Briefcase went missing at our dual meet with UCSD.  This case contained all of our return airline tickets, keys to the rental vans and various other sundries.  He was firm in his commitment that he had “looked everywhere” and had exhausted all possibilities.  I asked him, where he’d had it last, to which he replied that he had brought it into the locker room.   As he went flying across the deck knocking aside deck chairs and sending beach towels flying, I calmly walked back to where he’d changed and there behind the door to the very locker he used was the missing brief case hanging on an interior hook.  Returning to the pool deck with the goods, I was heralded as a savior moments before he took off in another direction to the next moment.

Moving onto the Torturous. 

There was the Saturday morning practice in mid-December of my senior year which followed the team’s end of the semester Bacchanal.  Most of us staggered, shuffled or dragged ourselves down to Ernst only to be treated to a workout which involved one particularly sadistic vertical kick set.  We were charged with maintaining a viable airway while holding a chair above our heads and at arm’s length for minutes at a time.   Suffice it to say, I’ve never come so close to drowning in all of my life. 

While I’m on the subject of torture, let me relay the moment when Coach decided he wasn’t getting quite enough performance out of our dual meet with Bowling Green University, on the last Saturday before Thanksgiving Break.  With the previous night’s workout apparently lost to a foggy haze, he subjected us to an impromptu set of 100’s at pace during the first diving break.  I only wish my body could have so blithely forgotten that previous evening’s workout.  For the Distance lane we were served a whopper of a main course, 30 x 250 on the 3 minutes, 2 pushed out, 3 recovery.  I’ve often wondered what was going through the minds of the other coach’s or athletes during one of Coachman’s little punitive sets for his swimmers while there is an actual swimming and diving competition underway. 

Then there was the medicinal, and you’re going to love this one because it is both something he did, and said.  His 5 swimmers just finished 1^st – 5^th in the finals of the 500 at conference, and he is somehow insulted on some cellular level by our “practice-like” performance and proceeds to pull us all out of the water and unceremoniously throw us all, still pink and panting, into the men’s shower.  This was one of the more memorable ass-chewings I witnessed during my four years, in particular because it was my ass.  I believe he referred to our behavior as a “cancer, on the team.”   Not only was he holding us hostage to his tirade in the shower room but nobody and I mean nobody was going in or out of that place while this was going on.  I seem to remember one poor swimmer from the college of Wooster inching his way through all the while trying to blend into the tile of the wall. 

But of course all of this bewilderment in words and deeds belies the true genius of his coaching philosophy.  While it has certainly been said before it warrants the retelling that Jim Steen is not really a college swimming coach; he is in actuality a salesman.  He sells a product, a process, of which he is proud and in which he believes and that is a better more complete you through the experience of overcoming perceived limitations – of swimming faster than you thought possible.  His mystic ways of getting you to buy into what he’s selling can be as tricky as they are effective.  Before you know it, you find yourself making coherent sense of one of his botched axioms, drawing inspiration from the natural world and possibly even believing that you might make the national team.  Then you know that you have been, as my team mate Brian Dowdall likes to say; “Jimmied.”  Who among us here tonight have not been “Jimmied” in one way or another.  My particular case extended beyond the circumference of the pool deck as Coachman had me frequently doing odd jobs around the office, fixing his bike again, and cleaning out his car, “Daveo I’m sure there’s enough change in the cup holder for the car wash.”  I simply couldn’t tell the man, “no,” and he could no sooner turn off the sales pitch than he could change his often imitated but never duplicated voice.  

For how could I say, “no” to the man who’s faith in the untapped potential of each and every swimmer who ever jumped into his pool never wavered – a faith that continued beyond our four short years at Kenyon?  How could I say “no” to the man whose commitment to cultivating relationships demanded paying attention to 60 or so needy swimmers all at the same time?   

Just when you thought he wasn’t watching, he’d step up into your face with some insight into your situation, bringing razor-like clarity to the moment, and confirming again that all the while he knew exactly what was going on with you.  For in those moments we were connected and committed to something more meaningful than could be quantified within the bounds of the lane lines.  In those moments when our doubt was shaken by our own human nature we were brought back to the promise of our own potential, and who could say “no” to that feeling – that we are in essence limitless.   

So maybe Ms. Angelou has something here after all, perhaps it is not what was said or what was done but how the Jim Steen program made us feel that has torn us away from our busy lives to honor him here tonight.  Maybe there is something here more meaningful than the national championships, the NCAA records, the post-graduate scholarships, the all-American certificates?  Perhaps it lies in the simple recognition that transcendence and inspiration are all around us, to be found not only in the pool but also in the pavement gymnastics of a brown squirrel as he’s being gunned down by the lead-foot maneuvers of mini-van driving madman.  

I don’t know what your next adventure holds for you Jim, but I’m sure you will continue to draw inspiration equally from both the magical as well as the mundane.  For my own part, I continue to draw new insight and meaning from my own time here on the hill and for that I am both humbled and truly grateful.   Thank you…