Swimming Blogs - Chris DeSantis

If there's one theme I'm picking up on in our recent coverage, its the people or teams that most people love to hate. Some videos pass by with just a smattering of comments, some go for over 300. Most of you know I'm talking about Auburn, but they aren't alone in this phenomenon. Last year I made the mistake of posting an article from Kenyon College's website comparing their coach Jim Steen to Vince Lombardi, John Wooden, Casey Stengel and Red Auerbach combined. Hundreds of comments later the dust settled on some serious hate.

If there's one thing that unites these lightning rods, its their success. I've often joked with people that one of my career ambitions is to have people rant on for pages about how terrible I am on an anonymous forum. Then I will know I've really made it.

Consider first the aforementioned Kenyon College Lords and Ladies. By one rubric, championships, their coach Jim Steen is more successful than the coaching legends mentioned were combined. Of course, none of those coaches had two cracks at the title every year and it is impossible to compare professional sports or even Division 1 basketball. Still, its pretty darn amazing that this team, men and women, has won consistently for the past 30 years save for a few hiccups. Just how do they do that?

Well, the haters will tell you that Kenyon cheats. They will tell you that they are abusing a foreign student scholarship program to bolster their team. And its true that Kenyon has been fairly unique in having high finishing foreign swimmers on their championship squad over the past few years, among them Latvian Olympian Andrejs Duda and a pair of distance swimming Canadians in Elliot and Tom Rushton. Other accusations I've heard (of course anonymously) have been allegations of improper financial aid being given to athletes and poor sportsmanship for a cheer they perform predicting themselves as next year's champion after each NCAA meet win. At times their is a tone of academic elitism to comments from people who believe their is something truly special about being ranked top ten in US News and World Report.

Yet, take away Kenyon's foreign born points from the most recent NCAA championship for men, and they are still well ahead of their competition. Year after year, their swimmers always seem to swim with machine like perfection at the most important times. Year after year, they frustrate rivals who appear ready to knock them off (exceptions in the recent past include Emory and Denison women.) They continually have swimmers come seemingly from out of nowhere to make huge contributions. They continually raise and set the bar for performance within Division 3. It can leave even their biggest detractors feeling pretty conflicted about the whole thing.

As for Auburn, despite the fact that their recent string of success was interrupted by Arizona last year, some part of it remained. Through David Marsh's championship run their was one consistent factor: Auburn's sprinters. Though Marsh has departed, their sprinters remain at the top of the heap. They proved as much when after Marsh's departure they destroyed their own record on the way to a 1:23.24 200 Medley relay at last year's NCAA Championship and also won the 200 freestyle relay.

Still, there's plenty of hate for Auburn to go around. Just look at any of the videos we've posted concerning them. Or go on collegeswimming.com to find the multiple pages of a message thread and film analysis declaring that Alexei Puninski went over 15 meters underwater on that 200 Medley relay. Auburn has also been denigrated for tapping foreign well's of talent, although the recruitment of foreign athletes is, ahem, nothing foreign to most but not all of their competitors. Message board posters rail on the academic standard of their university or make claims about fuzzy scholarship manipulation. Are you noticing the theme yet?

The point here is not what's justified and what isn't. I wanted to highlight the dual image of two swimming programs. They are both admired for their success and despised for it. It is likely that it will be this way as long as they are on top. Their choice is simple: to concede defeat to the swirling hate-storm, or keep on doing what they've been doing: win.