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Swimming: Longtime Badger Club coach continues to develop young talent
CHUCK SLATER
FOR THE PATENT TRADER
(Original publication: June 17, 2004)
It is hardly where one would expect to find a training ground of world-class swimmers, a small 10-acre camp nestled in the verdant residential grandeur of Larchmont.
Not California. Not Florida. Not any year-round playground of the sun, but Larchmont.
That's where John Collins has made the Badger Swim Club a force to be reckoned with in the championship pools of the world.
Three Olympic champs — Rick Carey of Mount Kisco, Lea Loveless Maurer from Crestwood and New Rochelle's Cristina Teuscher — went from their baby laps to the high point on the world's medal stand via Badger.
"John was one of the integral parts of my success," said Teuscher, now 26. "He really had a unique perspective. He put lots of priceless sayings on the Badger Web site. I remember him writing, 'My goal in life is not to create a bunch of sociopaths who can't blend into life.'
"I took things very seriously. He tried to make me laugh."
When Jenny Thompson, the most decorated swimmer in U.S. history and the owner of eight Olympic gold medals and 26 national titles, decided to interrupt her medical studies at Columbia to come out of retirement for this summer's Athens Olympics, she called upon Collins.
Collins has also coached five different NCAA champions from this area. To him, it's a justification of the belief that got him into coaching.
"I always thought you could take kids from Westchester and make them into national champions," he said.
International ones, too.
Collins, 58, didn't plan to end up as a swimming coach. Following an All-America career for Indiana University, he graduated from Fordham Law School.
But after his parents bought the property on which the Badger camp now stands in 1945, he had grown up "with a pool in my front yard." So during law school he earned pocket money coaching at the Rye YMCA and in 1972 he resurrected the Badger Swim Club on which he swam as a youth. He's had both feet firmly planted in the water ever since.
Then in 1984, the backstroker Carey brought home three Olympic gold medals.
"Carey," Collins said, "gave me the confidence I could coach at any level."
Besides being an assistant U.S. coach many times, Collins has been the head national women's coach for the Pan American Games, the Pan Pacific Games and the 2001 world championships.
"John is a big-time coach who I know and respect," Thompson said. "Being in New York and at Columbia, it's a natural that we would connect. It's been a great relationship."
Collins calls preparing Thompson for one final Olympics "a great responsibility."
One Badger swimmer is already in the Olympics. Paolo Duguet of Briarcliff Manor is on the team of her mother's native Colombia in the 400 and 800 freestyle.
Collins coaches the Badger senior teams, which include about 30 13-and-over swimmers who are looking to become national-caliber swimmers. The brother-sister combination of Kip and Carle Fierro work with the age-group youngsters.
In addition to Thompson, two Badger seniors have qualified for the Olympic Trials in Long Beach, Calif., in July: Bridget O'Connor of Scarsdale, a three-time state high school butterfly champion, and distance freestyler Kimi Kelly, the former Ursuline star who was an All-American at Virginia as a freshman.
Collins also sees great promise in a trio of Bronxville High juniors: the middle distance freestyler Whitney Sprague; the former state breaststroke champion Marilee Kiernan; and the backstroker Ryan Emanuel, a U.S. Swimming sectional champion.
The coach is also high on Alex Forrester, a 12-year-old girl who is a butterfly-freestyle specialist from Pound Ridge whom he has put on his senior team.
"We started working with her in the last year and she has a lot of promise," he said.
"He's a great coach and a good guy," Forrester said. "He gives helpful criticism."
Emanuel is more specific.
"He's really avid about self-development," Emanuel said of Collins. "He teaches us to solve our own problems; those who do become the swimmers they can be. He's been using the same tactics for 30 years. They work."
Collins also directs the multi-sport Badger Sports Club camp for 400 youngsters each summer with his mother and oldest son, John.
"It's hard to make a living when you coach just 30 kids," he said. "I do it because I like it."
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