An article published in the April / May issue of Splash Magazine by Tom Slear; Special Splash Correspondent

Within in the profession it is commonly believed that a career as a swim coach offers all of the promise of a free fall without a parachute. The salary scale is lighter than air. The hours are crushing. What free time there is falls out of synch with the rest of the work-a-day world.

The long hours and meager pay aside, there’s the matter of wafer-thin respect. "When I tell people that I coach swimming," says Paul Stafford of the Terrapins Swim Team in Concord, California, "they ask, ‘And you get paid for that?"

As head coach of Spring Swimming, a team with a roster of 120 swimmers in Newtown, Pennsylvania, Bob Platt is expected to oversee the entire program, coach the senior group, supervise 5 two-hour morning practices a week, and five 5 3 hour afternoon practices, and spend weekends either at practices or meets.

That computes to roughly 45 hours per week just on the pool deck, to say nothing of the time in the office planning practices, meeting with parents, board members, coaches, and taking calls from new parents as well as parents on the swim team, and all other aspects of running the organization. Vacations would be catches-as-catch-can, perhaps ten days in late summer.

For all this, the average salary range, according to a 1999 study by the American Swimming Coaches Association, is between 32,000 and 40,000 a year depending on experience.

"I’ve never calculated what I’m getting paid per hour," says Platt. "I don’t want to know."

Like writing, modeling, singing and acting, the coaching profession has few barriers to entry. The supply curve is skewed by wannabes and part-timers who can enter the field at any time, Need another coach? No swear. Find a college student or a willing parent and pay minimum wage.

The net effect is not only depressed salaries, which the coaches who last eventually overcome with creative, outside business endeavors, but a dismissive attitude toward the profession, which coaches young and old detest.

"Coaches are professionals, just like lawyers and accountants, " says Platt. "You wouldn’t call them everyday asking about tax matter. You assume that they know what they are doing. Yet, I’ll have parents calling me every day telling me how to do my job. It’s the thing that bothers me most."

(Only slightly more than inevitable question from parents, "What do you do all day?")

Platt has never been married, so he can’t address the problem many other coaches will list number one: a disheveled family life.

"This is a real tough commitment to have and also have a mate, " says Mike Bemis, who coaches the Thunderbird Aquatic Club in Anacortes, Washington. "I should know. I’ve been married twice (and divorced twice) and I attribute the majority of the problem to coaching. Let me say that it was pointed out tome. I was blind to it at the time."

The root of the problem, Bemis says, wasn’t the hours so much as the swimmers. They became his surrogate children. He looked on them not just as athletes to develop physically, but young men and women to nurture emotionally. He avidly followed their progress in school, the company they kept, the goals they formulated. If a swimmer was in trouble, Bemis know about it at least a day before the parents. He came to realize that there was no room in his life for kids of his own. He hesitates to admit it, but, at 53, unmarried and childless, the conclusion is inescapable. A career in coaching extracted an exorbitant price from his personal life.

Yet, when asked if he would do it all over again, Bemis answers, "I would try to change things, but I don’t think the outcome would be any different. All in all I really don’t have a lot of regrets. I got far more out of coaching than I gave up."

Low pay, long hours, little respect, and no family life, yet Bemis has few reservations. More surprisingly, he parrots many of the full-time club coaches in America, and certainly every other coach interviewed by Splash.

Go figure.