Mother Knows Best When It Comes to the Sunny Hills Team

Craig Schwartz, Sunny Hills High School swim coach, decided the Lancers needed to improve their diving team this season.

Because the Freeway League maintains diving as an event in dual meets and in the league championship, points were at stake.

But the problem was finding a coach who was qualified, available and willing to work for a $950 stipend.

So, Schwartz called his mother, Leota Roe.

“She was the first person who came to mind,” said Schwartz, a second-year coach. “She was the most qualified person for the job.”

Roe, 67, brought 40 years of diving experience and knowledge to the Sunny Hills team.

In the late 1940s, Roe was one of the top divers in the nation before retiring from the sport to raise a family. She returned to the sport in the 1950s and has coached on and off since 1960.

Roe’s expertise has helped the Lancers’ divers. In fact, the Sunny Hills diving program went from average to second-best in the Freeway League.

The Lancers’ Chris Bagger will dive in the Southern Section 3-A championships on Friday.

“She’s done an amazing job with the divers,” Schwartz said. “We didn’t have any divers qualify for the Southern Section meet last year. We have several young divers and, with mom coaching, will have a pretty good diving team the next couple of years.”

It is the second time in three years that Schwartz has called on his mother to help his team. In 1988, when he was coach at Rancho Santiago College, Roe volunteered as the diving coach.

Schwartz was hired at Sunny Hills last year and Roe stopped coaching. But when the idea of getting a diving coach came up, Schwartz went to Sunny Hills Athletic Director Ralph Trigsted with the idea of hiring his mother.

“He asked if I had any objections to hiring his mom,” Trigsted said. “Once he told me her qualifications, I told him to get her. Experience is a great teacher.”

Roe, who was born in Oklahoma City, entered a diving competition at the local YWCA when she was 11 and won it.

“Just a natural, I guess,” Roe said. “The sport really excited me, so I decided to get more involved.

The pool Roe trained at in Norman, Okla., was crude and the training sporadic because it was too cold to dive in the winter. Still, Roe improved and qualified for a national meet in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1938, when she was a high school sophomore.

At the meet, she impressed a diving coach from San Francisco, who wanted her to train with his team.

“He talked my parents into letting me go to San Francisco to train,” Roe said. “We worked out at this hotel, which had this tremendous pool. It was quite an experience. But after two years, I got homesick and went back to Oklahoma.”

There, she met and married Robert Schwartz and they moved to Los Angeles in 1941.

Roe continued to train and joined the Los Angeles Athletic Club in 1945. She soon became one of the club’s top divers.

During her time with the athletic club, Roe became good friends with Pat McCormick, who is the only diver to win four Olympic gold medals. She won two in 1952 and two in 1956.

In 1947, Roe finished second at the nationals. The following year, she placed third in the regionals and qualified for the Olympic trials, which were held in Detroit.

However, before the trials, Roe learned she was pregnant.

Roe had two children, Chuck and Craig, and raising a family ended her diving career. However, she remained active by teaching kids to swim.

“I never really knew much about my mom’s diving when I was a kid,” Schwartz said. “I do remember her teaching disabled kids to swim. She was wonderful to watch. The kids were really afraid of the water. Mom would spend hours with them and got them to a point where they could survive in the water. It was really inspirational.”

Roe got back into diving in 1960, as a coach. She returned to the Los Angeles Athletic Club in 1960 to teach swimming and was an assistant coach, working with the divers.

But the only diving Roe did was in the movie, “September Storm.” She was hired as a stunt double for Joanne Dru.

“It was really a low-class movie,” Roe said. “All I did was dive off a cliff. But I got a trip to Catalina out of it.”

Said Schwartz: “I’ve seen the movie a few times. The only good part is mom’s dive.”

Schwartz didn’t follow his mother into diving. He did become a good swimmer and water polo player at Sunny Hills, graduating in 1977.

He continued his water polo and swimming career at the University of the Pacific.

“The only diving I did was when I started a race,” Schwartz said. “I pretty much stayed in the water.”

Even now, Schwartz pretty much sticks to the swimming events, letting his mother handle the divers.

Roe has followed the sport closely during the past 30 years and attended the diving competition at the 1984 Olympics. She even has a collection of videotapes of diving competitions, which she uses to help the Sunny Hills team.

Schwartz said he hopes his mother will help the divers for a few more years, an offer Roe said she will accept.

“It’s just so much fun to work with the kids,” Roe said. “They know about my past, I guess, because they keep asking me to get on the board and show them how to do it right. But, after three back surgeries, my diving days are over.”