Comeback Bid Takes Shape in Calabasas Pool

Swimmer Julie Martin, a gold medalist in the 1987 Pan American Games, was ill-prepared for what awaited her in the pool at Stanford University last spring.

A pregnant woman splashed to the right, a bikini-clad woman to the left. A few lanes away, a man adjusted his snorkel. As if this group of recreational swimmers wasn’t motley enough, Martin’s new training partners also included one particularly overbearing lady.

“She was in front of me in my lane one day, going pretty slow and splashing a lot,” Martin remembered. “When I tried to pass her, she started clawing at me, scratching me.”

Martin had accepted a scholarship for this?

“There was definitely something wrong with that whole situation,” she said.

Martin’s two-month adventure in recreational swimming signaled the first step in what may prove a difficult journey back to the top. A world-class swimmer specializing in the 400- and 800-meter freestyle races for national champion Stanford in 1989, Martin in effect was booted from the team after posting slow times last summer in various meets in the Bay Area. Stanford Coach Richard Quick told her to train on her own.

Stanford’s recreational swimming class, featuring The Chlorine Slasher, served as the first stop on Martin’s comeback trail.

Step 2 is CLASS Aquatics, the club with which Martin works out at Calabasas High. Martin, a La Palma native now living with a Calabasas family, has been reunited with her former coach, CLASS leader Bud McAllister.

“It was not an accurate assessment,” Martin said of the banishment by Quick. “Coach Quick didn’t feel I was a contributing member of the team and told me I was done. I had had some bad times over the summer, but at the (Pacific 10 Conference championships) earlier in the year, I had three (personal) best times in four events.”

Quick said that he had looked beyond Martin’s performance at the Pac-10 meet, however, and felt that she just was not in good enough physical condition.

“She was a little out of shape,” said Quick, who, like Martin, arrived at Stanford in 1988. “Sometimes a coach has to say things that his athletes don’t really want to hear. She did well at Pac-10s, but I felt her performances there didn’t even scratch her potential.

“She has the talent to be an NCAA champion. At the time I made the decision, I felt she wasn’t moving in the direction that was going to give her a great season.”

Martin, 20, remained on athletic scholarship last year, so training on her own didn’t immediately affect her financially. That is not the case next year. After five months away from swimming--the first time in 17 years Martin had been away from the pool for a significant period--she met with Assistant Athletic Director Cheryl Levick in March. Levick served as arbitrator between Quick and Martin in drawing up an agreement, which Martin sought as a means not only to rejoin the team, but to help her afford to stay at Stanford.

The loosely structured agreement states that Martin must convince Quick that she is in better shape than last fall and committed to improvement.

“We both want her back on the team,” said Quick, whose team finished second in the NCAA championships this year. “We drew up a little schedule to work on getting her in good enough shape to get her on the team. I felt it best that she work on her own.”

Martin said that Quick, who previously coached at Texas, overlooked her past success.

“That’s why I talked to the assistant athletic director and got the contract,” Martin said. “I am not over the hill. I am not burnt out. I just think Coach Quick was unfamiliar with what I had done in the past. That’s why I took the recreational program in the spring. I have to show I’m serious about swimming. I have to show a commitment.”

The man in the middle is McAllister, who trained Martin and 1988 Olympic triple gold medalist Janet Evans three years ago in Fullerton. McAllister worked with the 1988 Olympic coaching staff and knows both Quick and Martin.

“She called me in April or May and said she wants to get back on the (Stanford) team,” said McAllister, who promptly scheduled Martin for 10 workouts a week.

“She has a different motivation now than she did when she was young. She has no plans to make the 1992 Olympic team. She wants to help her team regain the national championship. She wants her scholarship back.”

Although McAllister said that Martin needs to get her body-fat percentage down from about 25 to 20, he also said that Martin “has proved herself.”

“Her time (4 minutes 11 seconds) in the 400-meter freestyle three years ago is still one of the best times ever,” he noted.

McAllister’s CLASS club is better known for training future champions, not prominent swimmers of the past. Kids of all ages swim lap after lap, most chasing what is almost an impossible dream.

The younger swimmers in the water probably don’t know that Martin, six seconds shy of the Olympics in 1988, has taken a path they all want to take--Pan American Games, Olympic Trials, college scholarship. Most of the teen-agers definitely don’t know why she’s in the pool with them now.

Martin started swimming when she was 6 months old. At age 2 she went big time--the diving board.

“When I jumped off the high diving board, all the lifeguards came in after me,” Martin said. “My mom had to tell them, ‘No, she’s fine.’ ”

Martin, who says she has “a natural feel for the water” joined the Cerritos Aquatics Club at age 3. She swam in the 6-and-under age group, which she soon found out was going to be a problem.

“In order to compete, you had to be a member of the Amateur Athletics Union,” Martin said. “Even though I was 4, and you had to be 5 to be a member, I was able to get a card. Somehow an opposing coach found out and took the card away.”

Martin’s young career then featured many stops at the junior and senior national championships. In her four years at Kennedy High in La Palma, swimming became her life.

“All I wanted to do was train and compete,” she said. “People say, ‘Don’t you wish you went to the prom?,’ but I don’t feel like I missed out. I feel like everybody else was missing out.”

Among the things that many others missed out on was a trip to East Berlin. Calling it “her favorite place,” Martin says the city triggered her interest in industrial engineering, her major at Stanford.

“I went there as a member of the national team in 1986,” she said, “and I only spent four days there, most of it talking to other swimmers from that area. But it was fascinating. People there have to wait 12 years to get a car, for example. It was all a very different perspective on things.”

In 1987, Martin won a gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle in 4:11.87 in the Pan Am Games. In the spring of 1988, a few months before she arrived at Stanford, she went to the Olympic Trials. Problem was, so did Evans. While McAllister’s other pupil began her rise to stardom, Martin took fifth in both the 400- and 800-meter freestyle races.

Her respective times of 4:14 and 8:38 were good, but only the top two finishers in each event went on to the Games.

“You can’t go in to the Trials unrealistic,” McAllister said. “You have to know what you’re getting into. We did, and I think that’s why the disappointment wasn’t that great. The girl who finished second was closer to Janet, as far as previous times went, than Julie was to her. So Julie knew that in order for her to qualify, she would have to swim a perfect race and someone else would have to make a mistake. That didn’t happen.”

Dealing with her Olympic Trials disappointment helped Martin deal with her next setback, the disagreement with Quick.

“Just because I didn’t go to the Olympics, the world doesn’t end--though that’s how I felt before and directly after,” Martin said. “A lot of great things happened to me because of swimming.”

Martin has two years left at Stanford, and wants to spend both with the swim team. While personal motivation and loyalty to the team are important to her, she also realizes that swimming is only a part of her life. Once her college days end, Martin plans to quit “cold turkey and get on with the rest of my life.”

Martin isn’t ready to say goodby just yet, however.

“Sometimes you forget what you want,” McAllister said. “Sometimes you forget how hard you can push yourself.”

In September, when the fall semester starts anew, Julie Martin may find out once again.