By Katie Lively, Swimming World College Intern
A car pulls up to the curb. A kid gets out of the car and comes running up to the pool yelling, “Hey, Coach, I’m here!”
That was the advice Team Eugene Aquatics head coach Scott Kerr received on the second day of his first assistant coaching job in 1983. He walked into the head coach’s office and admitted he knew nothing about coaching and needed help. The head coach offered up that anecdote as “the secret to coaching.”
Scott didn’t get it. The head coach told him again. He was still lost.
“As a young 20 year old, I’m like, ‘I need to know what I’m supposed to do here,’” he said. “And he said, ‘That kid wants to be here. He’s excited to see the coach and get knowledge and be there. That’s coaching. The other parts happen, but if they don’t want to be there, it’s not going to be enjoyable for anybody.’”
Scott stumbled upon that first job by accident. He was swimming for the Pine Crest School in Florida when the novice coach quit. The head coach recruited him to help coach the novice group. Scott thought it was for one day, but the following day, the head coach announced to Scott that he needed to go back and do it again because he was the new novice coach.
The unexpected turn of events ended up working out in Scott’s favor. From there, he realized that he truly enjoyed giving back to the sport (and was pretty good at it). He left coaching to pursue work that would utilize his degree in hotel and restaurant management, but returned in 1990 to take an assistant coaching job that opened up in Eugene, Oregon, just an hour outside his hometown of Salem.
More than two decades later, it ended up working out in my favor, too.
At the end of my sophomore year of high school, I was incredibly discouraged and decided to quit club swimming. A few months later, a couple friends who swam for a nearby club encouraged me to try swimming for their coach, who they swore was amazing. I’d seen this guy at club meets through the years and was a little skeptical— my main impression of him was that he was really loud, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to deal with someone I barely knew yelling at me all summer.
Nevertheless, I decided to try swimming for Scott Kerr. As it turns out, he yells a lot because he’s very enthusiastic. As it turns out, he’s also the reason I’m still swimming today.
In May, I wrote about the times I’ve considered quitting and why I would encourage people in that position to reconsider. I discussed internal motivation to bounce back and prove others wrong, but in that piece, I missed a key factor.
I, like a lot of other swimmers, am motivated by my own competitive nature and desire to be successful. However, when we reach the level of frustration that leads us to question whether swimming is worthwhile, we’re usually beyond the point where that is enough to keep going. More often than not, we rely on one or more people to help us stay encouraged and rediscover why we are in the sport of swimming.
I’ve been swimming competitively for nearly 11 years. I’ve seen people far more talented than myself grow frustrated and quit. They often express that they feel too much pressure or that staring at a black line for several hours a week just made the sport stale for them.
Those are two of the reasons I wanted to quit as a high school sophomore. And swimming for a coach who does everything in his power to make swimming more than staring at a black line, as well as truly caring about his swimmers as individuals, has made all the difference in the three years since.
“I just wanted to make sure that every single kid enjoyed it as much as I felt like I did,” Scott said.
Photo Courtesy: Maya Williams-Young
Scott also recognizes that we have other activities and lives outside of the pool—and that may cause stretches where swimming is not our very top priority.
For one of my club teammates, University of Puget Sound rising sophomore Jordan O’Hanlon, that moment was when she felt burnt out during the spring of her junior year of high school. She decided to take a break from the pool to play high school tennis. Scott responded by attending one of her matches to show his support for her even though she wasn’t training with him.
Both Jordan and I have talked to Scott after disappointing seasons. After not swimming as well as she wanted to at last year’s Northwest Conference Championships, Jordan said she felt unmotivated and questioned whether she wanted to continue swimming for the next three years. When she came home for spring break, she turned to Scott to discuss what had happened.
“We talked about what happened at conference and why I didn’t swim well,” Jordan said. “Then we talked more about why I swim, and he helped me realize that there’s a lot more to the sport than just doing well, going best times, et cetera.”
While she doesn’t think she would have seriously considered quitting either way, talking to Scott left her excited to get back in the water over the summer and train with him for her next college season.
“He always helps me work through the reasons behind things so I can figure out how to fix them in the future,” Jordan said. “Also, I appreciate that he focuses on his swimmers truly enjoying the sport.”
Her experience sounded nearly identical to ones I’ve had with Scott along the way. Our experiences were similar because the conversations themselves weren’t too similar— they were both personalized to our own needs as a swimmer rather than cookie-cutter conversations about why swimming is too important to quit.
I’m fully aware that one day, I won’t be swimming competitively anymore. It’s something I’ve been doing most of my life and it will be a big adjustment.
At the same time, I want to go out on my own terms. I wouldn’t have had any closure if I had quit the sport in my most frustrated times– I think I would have looked back on it and wondered what might have been if I’d given it another shot. Not everything in life ends on a happy note, but an athletic career can usually conclude in a positive way if the right people are guiding us through it.
Scott amazes me all the time with how much he cares about helping his swimmers succeed. I believe that when I do hang up the suit, he’ll support my decision. But so far, he’s usually known before I have that I really wasn’t ready to quit. He has helped me and others find motivation that was buried beneath frustration and disappointment.
As he put it, “At some point, we’re going to hang up our suit. We’re done. I just hope when that suit gets hung up, it’s for the right reasons. Like, ‘I feel like I’ve done everything I wanted to do in this sport. It wasn’t taken away from me.’”