Swimming World - TV

Peter Busch: Welcome to the Morning Swim Show for Wednesday, January 4, 2012. I'm your host Peter Busch. In the FINIS monitor today we'll talk to Jeff Pease, founder and head coach of North Coast Aquatics. Jeff joins us right now in the FINIS monitor from San Diego. Coach, Happy New Year. How are you?



Jeff Pease: I'm doing well. Thank you, same to you.



Peter Busch: So yesterday we talked to Tony Batis from Palo Alto, whose team recently got on the USA swimming club excellence list. Your team is on that list as well, congratulations.



Jeff Pease: Thank you very much. It's a great honor for our program.



Peter Busch: Tell us about your program. What's the training philosophy there?



Jeff Pease: Thank you.



Peter Busch: Tell us about your coaching philosophy there at North Coast Aquatics.



Jeff Pease: Well, I have been - this is going to be my 36th year believe it or not. Thirty-three with North Coast Aquatics as I founded it in 1979 and you know I don't think my philosophy has changed tremendously. I am very big on what we call now capacity coaching with the kids I coach, 13 to 18 years old and I have been really pretty - had a pretty set constant cycle for several years now. You know, we changed things around, mostly what we change probably has been the dry run program but I would say the training cycle in the water has been pretty constant for several years.



Peter Busch: Capacity coaching, what does that mean, how would you describe it?



Jeff Pease: That means building the base, building the aerobic capacity, you know, I listened to a talk by Bob Bowman back in the spring and he talked about the number one goal of age group are really developmental coaches which you know I consider myself the, you know, the coaching 13 to 18 years old is that you know, our job is to build the biggest bucket of capacity and that really stuck with me and I think that as the kids get older, then you know, the goal is to start utilizing that capacity so that's really what I've done for the last several years.



Peter Busch: Fascinating how different coaches can have great success using different philosophies, isn't it because a lot of coaches these days do more of you know, high intensity, lesser aerobic work kind of stuff and it just shows, I mean different - different methods can work.



Jeff Pease: I think - I think Peter that it really depends on your athletes, and what I found that most of the athletes that I get into sport are what I consider aerobic athletes. They are not really anaerobic, they are younger, they are less mature, they have less muscle and I just felt like that this model work better for those kids than you know throwing a lot of intensity out and we do some fast swimming, you know, every week but I would say the meat and potatoes of our program is what I call threshold training which we do almost 40 to 50% of the week.



Peter Busch: Let's talk about some of the swimmers that you are training right now. Kendyl Stewart, great high school swimmer right now, a butterflyer going to USC which we had her on the show not too long ago. She seemed like a great kid.



Jeff Pease: She is an awesome young lady, a great team mate, very coachable and she is really learning, particularly in the last year to find out how good she can be and we are really excited. We think she is gonna be a player at the Trials.



Peter Busch: You got a good distance swimmer, Eric Hedlin.



Jeff Pease: Yeah, Eric he is now in Canada. He decided he has got dual citizenship with Canada so he spent a year up in Victoria, Vancouver going to school and training with Randy Bennett who is the national team distance coach for Canada and their trials in April will really be exciting. Right now, he is the second fastest miler in Canada, and so we are excited to see hopefully he make the Canadian Olympic team.



Peter Busch: That's neat, I haven't heard that and of course you mention you go back to North Coast Aquatics all the way back to 1979. When you founded the team and it is sort of one of the unique parts about the club was a coach run and founded club.



Jeff Pease: Correct.



Peter Busch: I don't know, is that still rare today or there a lot more teams that have followed that model?



Jeff Pease: I think more- I think more and more coaches are taking their destiny, you know in their own hands. You know, it's difficult to work for apparent group that changes boards, you know on a yearly or you know semi-regular basis and you are always having to re-educate parents, and I found that I would not honestly -- to be candid with you I would not be coaching 36 years later if it had been for the fact that I started my own team.



Peter Busch: One of your greatest coaching successes was Kurt Grote back in the 90's.



Jeff Pease: Correct.



Peter Busch: 96 Olympian for the Americans and the story goes, as our resident breaststroker Jeff Commings tells it to me, Kurt was a freestyler but you realized that he was gonna be better off as a breaststroker so you help make the transition which led to him being kind of no name swimmer to national champion in like a year.



Jeff Pease: Yes, Kurt - Kurt was really a late bloomer. He played soccer growing up and he became allergic to grass and highly allergic to grass. If you know his story, he was a highly asthmatic young person and his doctor told him to start swimming. He came out to swim for me two weeks before the high school championships because he didn't know how to use a starting blocker. He was -he did not know how to turn and he was qualified for his first high school championships in the 50 and 100 free and thought he was a sprinter - thought he was a sprint freestyler and then he had a little success at that championship and then came out for my year round club and then a year later, he won the 50 and 100 free at the high school championships, but the day after the high school championships, his junior year in high school, he asked me if he could just enter a club meet and swim the 100 breast for fun and I said, wow this kid- this is where this kid needs to be and that was the start of it.



Peter Busch: Wow, what was it about - he did in a swim that maybe you didn't notice in training earlier or had he just not train any breast stroke and seen his great potential?



Jeff Pease: You know, we spent so much time to try and get him to survive practice because he was so far behind the group that you know and he had a lot of kids in the group that were a lot better than him so you know he was -we were tunnel vision with him being a sprint freestyler but he would an IM sets I would watch this, this kick that he would have and he had this natural surge to his kick, very un-orthodontic breaststroke stroke but I said, you know, I think that, that this needs to be something we need to develop and by that summer, he was already qualified for the summer junior nationals by the next fall he made senior nationals in the breast strokes and you now basically walked onto Stanford. If you talk to Skip Kenney, he probably will say, he is probably the greatest walk-on the history of Stanford swimming, men's swimming.



Peter Busch: And the rest is history.



Jeff Pease: And really fast tracked, yeah.



Peter Busch: Well, coach that is a very interesting story. I - that's really cool. I had no idea. Well, thanks a lot for sharing it. You have nice holidays I hope?



Jeff Pease: Well, I have a couple days off but we are in the middle of most programs are when the middle of the winter training camp, we are about 12 workouts into 20 practices so I am spending a lot of time on the pool deck right now.



Peter Busch: Well coach, happy New Year once again to you. Thank you very much for joining us.



Jeff Pease: Thank you, I appreciate it. Have a good day.



Peter Busch: Alright. That's Jeff Pease joining us in the FINIS monitor today from San Diego and that's it for today's show. I'm Peter Busch reminding you to keep your head down up to finish.

Checkout