SWIMMING ON THE JOB : Thousand Oaks swim school is business as well : as pleasure for aquatic-minded Daland family
People who work 12-hour days, seven days a week, are not supposed to look like Ingrid Daland.
Walking along a pool deck smack in the middle of her 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. shift, decked out in a bathing suit, sunglasses, wide-brim straw hat and wide grin, she might look like she’s hardly working, but she’s diligently running the recently opened Daland Swim School in Thousand Oaks.
In fact, she’d roll up her sleeves if there were any on the bathing suit.
Instead, she jumps into a pool and instructs a wailing 1-year-old how to hold his breath and kick in the water at the same time.
Her soothing words and gentle hands turn the youngster’s cries to gleeful giggles--he is discovering the joys of a cool pool on a hot day.
Daland hands the youngster to his mother and climbs out of the water. She walks to a second pool, where some senior citizens are moving about as lazily as walruses.
“If you don’t get to swimming, you’ll get no results,” Daland says through a German accent softened by more than 20 years of living in Westlake Village.
A world-class West German swimmer in the early 1960s, Daland competed at the U.S. nationals in 1962 and gave new meaning to the term “swim meet.” She fell in love with Peter Daland, coach of the USC swim team, and they married two years later, making her a U.S. citizen.
The couple has gotten along swimmingly ever since. Peter has coached at USC for 30 years, winning nine national championships. They have three children--Peter Jr., 20; Bonnie, 19; and Leslie, 17, who swam the fastest 1,500 meter freestyle in the world last year (16:15.8) and is an Olympic hopeful for 1988.
Ingrid, 44, is just hoping her enterprise isn’t typical of most small businesses.
“An MBA who swims here told me that 80% of small business fail in the first year,” she says. “That was depressing but I’m into it too far to back out now. Swim schools don’t make a lot of money, but I don’t have to support a family with it. It’s like a hobby.”
If congeniality is key, the school should prosper. Daland makes members feel like they are swimming in the privacy of a backyard pool.
“Ingrid is wonderful,” says Larry Mohr, who swims regularly at the school with his wife, Delores. “She has a way of making anyone feel comfortable.”
Although this is her first business venture, Ingrid taught swimming at the Los Angeles Athletic Club and the Westlake Tennis Club for 20 years. Peter, 66, is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the school, but he gave the venture a healthy financial blessing.
“Peter lets me do what I want but it’s all his money basically,” Ingrid says. “It’s our retirement money. I’m very confident its gonna work. . . . It better work.”
Beneath the hat and sunglasses, she smiles broadly. Ingrid Daland’s sense of humor has survived a series of setbacks associated with the school, which she purchased last September for $280,000. The previous owner had run a swim school since 1968 but had let it deteriorate in recent years.
“None of the filters worked, the plumbing didn’t work, the electrical and decking had to be replaced,” she says. “Before I knew it, I was building a new school.”
Contractor Craig Russell still is renovating the facility, although the school has been open since January.
“I wasn’t going to replace the locker rooms, but one day Craig leaned against a wall and fell through. I had the solar pads checked and the guy stuck his foot through the roof.
“Murphy’s Law went into effect as soon as I bought it.”
Despite the adversity, she maintains a light outlook. A bank officer came out to the school recently to inform her she didn’t qualify for a loan.
“I never heard of a loan officer coming out to tell you that,” she says, grinning. “What did he think, that because I’m a woman I’d get hysterical in the bank and embarrass his clients?”
She got the loan from another bank this week and expects the locker rooms to be completed in time for a grand opening June 1. Now Daland really has something to grin about.
And her husband is smiling, if from afar. In addition to his duties as USC coach, Peter has a coaching-clinic business and will be swimming consultant to the world university games in Yugoslavia in July.
“The school will be blazing away in a year,” he says. “It’s a good investment. A swim school is a necessary business for this community.
“It serves an area of 300,000-400,000 people from Calabasas to Camarillo. It will drown-proof a lot of people and it provides healthful activity to all ages.”
Clients include the Westlake High swim team, which practices and holds meets at the school, the Conejo Valley Adult School therapy program for the handicapped and the Conejo-Simi Aquatics Club, which Ingrid coaches. There are also novice and senior citizen programs.
The larger of the two pools is a short-course (75 feet by 42 feet). After 5 p.m., it is reserved for serious lap swimmers and adults. The smaller (64 by 20) pool, which will be covered with a bubble during the winter, is kept at a warmer temperature for young children.
“I encourage serious swimmers and they will have their own pool,” Ingrid says. “Kids doing cannonballs in front of your face isn’t much fun.”
It may take a while, but she would like the school to develop national-caliber swimmers and become sort of a Mission Viejo-north. She’ll put the Conejo-Simi Aquatics Club through rigorous workouts all summer. The most dedicated members will swim 20,000 meters a day, seven days a week.
With so much time spent instructing small children, seniors and handicapped swimmers, coaching gives Daland an outlet for serious competition.
“Coaching is therapy,” she says. “I forget everything when I get on the deck.”
Yet Daland says she has “1,000 ideas” on how to make swimming fun for folks of all aptitudes and ages.
“Once a month we’ll have a rookie meet,” she says. “Anyone is welcome. I’m also thinking of holding adult novice meets. Just a low-key thing for some friendly competition.”
It disturbs her that swimming is a sport popular in the United States only during the Olympics. Even young competitive swimmers are unfamiliar with American swim stars.
“We had a workout a few years ago and John Naber walked on the deck,” she said of the former Olympian and USC swim star. “I introduced him and I think the kids thought he was Jim Nabors. They were waiting for him to do, ‘Shazam.’ ”
The familiarity of the school’s location is to Daland’s advantage, however. It was the only private swim school in the Conejo Valley for nearly 20 years under the previous owner.
“This has been so long a part of the community,” she says. “A lot of memories are attached. Women with young children come up and say, ‘My mother took me here when I was little. Look what you’ve done with the place!’ ”
Ingrid Daland grins again. It was nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with some 12-hour days out by the pool.
