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Memorable Coaching—The Dreaded "Trays" ~1973

As a teen-age athlete, you view your coach in several different ways. You look to your coach not only for instruction and direction in your sport, but also for inspiration, motivation, guidance, and even a significant amount of role-modeling. For a teen-age swimmer, the coach plays an important role in life, indeed; perhaps spending several more hours a day with the kid than his or her own parents do. If you like your coach, life is good and you pursue your athletic goals with vigor. If you don't like the coach, well, then life pretty much sucks.

(If your coach happens to be the gorgeous and appropriately-named Becky Love, you might also develop a total schoolboy lust-crush, but that is a different story entirely, and won't be discussed here.)

This story begins when I finally made the move from "Park Board" swimming into the AAU. The Park Board league was where everyone swam at their local summertime pool and competed to be the best in the neighborhood. The AAU (which has since been replaced by USA Swimming) was where you competed with the world. Park Board teams usually had high school kids coaching their teams; AAU clubs hired professional and experienced experts. AAU clubs had an enormously more structured and rigorous program. And they were much more expensive.

In Wichita, there were basically only two AAU teams that counted; the Wichita Swim Club (WSC) and the East Branch YMCA. While the East Branch Y had some quality coaches and some excellent swimmers, it was (and is) a generally accepted fact that WSC had the finest swimming program in Kansas.

Moving up from the Park Board, I really didn't care which team I joined. Either one would be a HUGE step up from the team I'd been on. But my buddies (Canaday, Odle, and Dillard) were members of WSC, so that's where I went.

The coach at the time was a gentleman named Doug Sidles. Doug was a great guy, and an excellent coach. We all enjoyed his sense of humor, his swimming expertise, his energy, and yes, even the fact that he worked our butts off. He became sort of a beloved surrogate father figure for many of us, and was one of the reasons we enjoyed our swimming experience so much.

Unfortunately, there was a scandal, and Doug ended up leaving the team. (By today's standards, it would probably be considered a minor scandal -- no one would need to leave the organization. Even at the time, most of the swimmers felt that Doug should have stayed. But it was not our decision. The coaching position was suddenly vacant.)

How do you replace a coach who was so well-liked by the team? At the time, many of us were not happy with the way it was handled, but in hindsight, they had found the perfect solution. They hired an "interim" coach, who was asked to get the team through the summer as the Board continued the search for the next "permanent" coach.

So who do you get? The obvious pool of available coaches was the group of local high-school swim team coaches. Only two of the schools had coaches that were considered to be appropriately knowledgeable about the sport; the others tended to be Driver's Ed instructors or Band Directors who needed the extra cash that coaching a "minor" sport could bring. (Our coach at West High would start each practice by saying "So, what do you guys think we should do?") Southeast High School was where most of the WSC kids would attend, so it probably wouldn't have been a good idea to hire their coach. The only other knowledgable coach was John Deardorf, who coached at South High.

We hated John Deardorf.

Why? Because we hated South High, and anything associated with it. We hated Deardorf particularly because he was so enthusiastic on the pool deck, and because he worked so hard to inspire his swimmers. Of course, the South High guys loved him, but we thought he was just obnoxious.

And besides, he was from South. Ewww!

Now, before I continue with the story of how badly we hated Mr. Deardorf, I must set the record straight. After I actually got to know him, I came to have tremendous respect for him, and learned that he was a great guy. A very likeable man, with a great deal of character and talent.

But at the time...

Everyone had loved Doug Sidles, so anyone who walked in as his replacement was bound to be treated as a vile interloper. We may not have been able to grow whiskers or vote yet, but we could still be mean and obnoxious to outsiders. We did not make it easy on poor John.

In retrospect, he must have understood that part of his job description was to endure the animosity of the swimmers; to get the bile out of our systems so that the "permanent" coach would be accepted and welcomed the following fall. What a monumentally tough thing to ask someone to do, but Deardorf charged right in and took the reins. And he found a unique and terrible tool with which to work this much-needed transformation: the dreaded TRAY.

What is a Tray, you ask? Well, it's no secret that increasing resistance during training results in an increase in the athlete's strength. Heck, that's the whole idea behind weightlifting. It makes sense. So some brilliant engineer decided to create a device that would help swimmers feel more resistance during swim practices. The Tray was the result.

Imagine a piece of sheet stainless steel, about 10 inches wide and 16 inches long. Fold it into an "L" shape, string a belt across it and strap it onto your torso in a way that makes an 8 x 10 inch segment of steel project outward from your belly button. When swimming, it becomes a sort of transverse shark fin on your underside. It creates resistance. It also totally screws up your stroke, your body position, and your ability to practice the movements you'd use in competition. But it does create resistance.

The only other thing that would cause as much damage to your stroke would be to swim lots and lots of distance butterfly. Once your arms die (which happens very quickly with butterfly), you simply end up teaching your body how to do the stroke incorrectly. You make all sorts of adjustments that do NOT help your racing form, but when you're that tired, it's the only way to survive.

So John had us do distance butterfly with the Trays on. 800 butterfly with Trays. 10 x 200 butterfly with Trays. No-breather butterfly with Trays. Let's just see how far you can go...butterfly with Trays.

I'm pretty sure the team was unanimous in wanting to see how many trays could be stuffed into the coach's esophagus.

Oh, don't misunderstand...we did plenty of butterfly without the trays, too. Plenty of stroke-ruining, brain-cell-destroying, oh-God-please-kill-me-now, #$@%*&! butterfly. Oh yeah, we got physically stronger due to all this resistance training, but I'm sure that more than a few of us have paid a lot of good money to a gaggle of psychotherapists to help us recover from the emotional scars that the #$@*&! trays left upon our fragile teen-age mindsets.

[Deep cleansing breath. OK, I'm better now.]

After that dreadful summer, Bill Spahn came in to take over. When Bill said that we were no longer going to use the trays, there was much rejoicing. And when Deardorf left, he took any remnants of our anger over Doug's departure with him. We loved Bill, without reservation, and the team prospered magnificently under his leadership.

And John Deardorf made it possible. Thank you John. We owe you.