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Randy Bennett: From a town with no pool, to mentoring an Olympic swimming medallist
For unlikely routes to the Olympics, it's tough to top how Randy Bennett, head coach of the Olympic swim team, hails from a town which didn't even have its own pool during his childhood.
Many coaches got into the craft by happenstance. No one sets out to be a coach initially. However, Bennett, whose best-known pool protégé, distance man Ryan Cochrane, is aiming to be a double medallist at London 2012, has a unique backstory. Imagine a NHL coach who never played organized hockey, but ended up getting started toward that career because he took a job helping out the local arena as a teen. Bennett and his childhood contemporaries in northern British Columbia didn't get a pool until one was built not long after Canada hosted the 1976 Summer Olympics, by which point he was almost through high school.
From Emma Gilchrist:
The head coach of Canada's 2012 Olympic swim team grew up in Fort Nelson, B.C., a town that didn't even having a swimming pool until he was in high school. "They opened a pool when I was in Grade 10 or 11 and lifeguarding was a good way to make money," he says. "When I graduated, I went to Fort McMurray to be a lifeguard and it turned out they needed a swim coach."
And the rest, as they say, is history. (Impact magazine, July 18)
Bennett has also noted part of the reason he took up lifeguarding is it meant he had a part-time job "inside where it was warm," a nice benefit during both Canadian winters and summers.
Becoming a high-level coach without having been there is unlikely in a mainstream sport, although it's worth noting that six head coaches in NCAA major-college football never played at that level. Swimming needs volunteers and when an 18-year-old Bennett moved to Fort McMurray, Alta., in the early 1980s, he was in the right place at the right time.
Three decades later, he can still rhyme off his charges from the Fort McMurray Manta Swim Club that oversaw along with an older coach named Don Wilson.
"I had no competitive swimming background experience but they needed a warm body and I was there. Don bailed me out a million times as I made so many mistakes as it was a pretty steep learning curve for me.
"Originally I wanted to go back to (post-secondary school) to become a teacher but coaching with the swim club got me into the sport.
"First and foremost, Don was well connected in the swimming community and at that time Canadian swimming was in its heyday. I got to meet the best-of-the-best and was exposed to the mindset and behaviour of the culture." (Fort McMurray Impact, June 5)
That "heyday" peaked with Canada winning eight medals, albeit boycott-assisted ones, in 1984. Under Bennett's watch, the country's swimmers have a reasonable expectation of winning three, which is relatively good compared to how the country has fared in the past 3-4 Games.
He's also gone against the current at the club level. The competitive Darwinism in swimming is really cutthroat. It is commonplace, speaking as someone who remembers having to pore over page after page of swim meet results as a small-town sportswriter, that a lot of youth swimmers quit by the early teens when it seems obvious the Olympics is probably not in their future. Bennett's club, Island Swimming, has ignored that conventional wisdom.
He increased enrolment from 150 to 600 in five years by turning the system on its head.
"We decided to measure the success of the program by the number of kids who graduated from high school, rather than if they met a swimming standard," he says. "Instead of losing kids at 14 years old, we started to be able to think about long-term development." It's that outsider's approach that's given Bennett his edge.
Who knows, maybe that helps turn up a later bloomer who uses swimming as a portal to get pay for her/his education at a school in the NCAA or CIS. Or something even grander.
Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Contact him at neatesager@yahoo.ca and follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.
