The Success of a Salesman : Pelton’s Pitches Help to Keep Mission Viejo Swimmers on Top for 17 Years

Hush. Mike Pelton is selling again.

This time he’s pitching an idea to his Mission Viejo High School boys’ swim team. They can win the Southern Section 4-A championship tonight.

Never mind that Matt Turnbull, one of the team’s top performers, has the chicken pox. Forget that San Marino, the defending champion, is loaded with talented swimmers.

It can be the Diablos night.

Just listen.

“ ... if Matt doesn’t swim, it’s no problem ... remember, we’re the No. 1 seed in all the relays ... you can make it happen ... we have the people ... I think we can do better ... “

This is Mike Pelton at his best, begging, prodding, demanding more from his team. A salesman who peddles daily affirmation, that I-can-get-there-from-here way of life.

For 17 years, Pelton has been the boys’ swim coach at Mission Viejo High School. His teams won 13 consecutive 4-A titles from 1976-88 and have finished second the past three seasons.

Success? No coach has won more Southern Section championships in a one sport.

Yet, Pelton’s achievements are looked on with skepticism by some. They think all he is selling is a bill of goods.

Success? With the Mission Viejo Nadadores, one of the top club teams in the nation, just a couple of backstrokes away, how could one not have success?

“My answer is, that’s a bunch of bull,” Pelton said.

“I will state this: Every kid has swam faster for me than he did at Junior or Senior Nationals two or three weeks earlier. That has to do with the motivation and how much they care about our program. Someone has to orchestrate that, and I would hope that a lot of that rests on my shoulders.”

He’s selling again.

“I’m an entrepreneur,” Pelton said.

He has certainly bought into his life as a teacher and swim coach. This, he said, is what he has wanted to do since the sixth grade.

Pelton was adopted as an infant and raised mostly by his mother, who had come from South Africa. Katherine Pelton got divorced when her son was 3 and moved from Chicago to Pasadena, then settled in Norwalk.

There she taught elementary school for more than 30 years.

“I really admired her when I would watch Mom teach and how she played an important part in molding kids,” Pelton said. “The way she motivated them. Some she had to praise constantly, some she had to be firm with. I would see the results at night, when she corrected papers. I knew then I wanted to be a teacher.”

Pelton combined that dream with his other love, aquatics. He progressed as a swimmer from beginner’s lessons to AAU competition, and played water polo.

“Athletics is strictly an auxiliary of your academic program,” said Pelton, who is an English teacher. “You’re trying to mold a young person into forming values, self-discipline and mental toughness.”

Pelton swam at California High School in Whittier, where he was graduated in 1965, and for several club teams. He also played water polo and swam for Cal State Fullerton in the early ‘70s.

He was drafted in 1966 and spent two years in the Army, where he formed a youth swim team.

“I looked at the Army regulations and knew what I wanted to do,” Pelton said. “I formed a team from the dependents, kids whose fathers were in the service, at Ft. Bragg. It was the first service team to do well against outside clubs.”

This has been Pelton’s way all along--study, organize and take over.

While working as a lifeguard one summer at a high school, he formed a swim team from the kids who came there and won the L.A. County swim title.

“Mike is always thinking, looking for an edge,” El Toro swim Coach Jeff Grosse said. “He seems to have something going on. His brain is always going.”

It’s a trait that hasn’t always won him friends in coaching circles.

In 1988, Southern Section officials ruled that Tsukasa Kawabuchi, a talented swimmer from Japan, had to sit out one year before he could compete for the Diablos. His eligibility was restored the day of the 1989 South Coast League finals.

Pelton scheduled a dual meet the next day and got Kawabuchi’s qualifying times to the Southern Section in time to get him into the 4-A championships.

“I like Mike as a person, but sometimes I think winning is more important than principles to him,” Villa Park swim Coach Jeff Erhlich said.

Said Grosse: “Mike is always watching stuff. He saw an opening and took advantage of it. People got outsmarted, so they got angry.”

People have been stewing, on and off, since Pelton took over the Diablo program in 1976.

Pelton had never coached high school swimming until he got the Mission Viejo job. He had run club teams while he attended Cal State Fullerton.

He graduated in 1974 and joined the Diablo staff as an assistant that September.

“I had offers before, but in my mind I felt I needed to be at a school that I felt I could develop into a champion,” Pelton said.

Whether he made the Diablo program or the program made him has been an on-going debate.

The Diablos--led by future Olympian Brian Goodell--won the first of 14 consecutive titles in 1975 under coach Mark Schubert, who also coached the Nadadores. The next fall, the Southern Section adopted a rule that a high school coach couldn’t work with his athletes outside their sport’s season.

Schubert had to choose and he picked the Nadadores. He recommended Pelton for the Mission Viejo job.

“I liked his enthusiasm,” said Schubert, who now coaches the women’s team at the University of Texas. “What impressed me was how supportive he was of the kids. Coaching is a lot more then standing on the pool deck taking splits. He works with these kids behind the scenes, getting them to achieve their goals.”

The Diablos overachieved, in fact. They dominated the 4-A, sometimes to overkill proportions, for the next 13 seasons.

Mission Viejo scored 323 points at the 4-A final in 1985. Capistrano Valley finished second with 99.

Other coaches pointed to the influx of swimmers on the Diablo team from outside the Mission Viejo area, sometimes from outside the United States. They came to train with the Nadadores, and those of high school age often ended up swimming for Mission Viejo.

“It made the 4-A championship a joke,” Foothill swim Coach Tom DeLong said. “It kind of turned into a battle for second place. And, in a lot of minds, the second-place finisher was the real champion.”

But Pelton has said that if a kid wants to swim for the high school team, it’s the coach’s responsibility to see that it’s possible. This season, Mission Viejo has two swimmers from Poland, Adam Grodzky and Marcin Malinski.

“Obviously, Mike benefited from the Nadadores being so close to his school,” Schubert said. “But I don’t think he needs to apologize for that. I think it’s a tribute to him as a coach that he could make it work. There’s always whiners out there complaining about the guy on top.”

Make no mistake about it, Nadadore swimmers or no Nadadore swimmers, Pelton can coach. While he gets his share of club swimmers, he gets many more who have no formal training.

Such as sophomore Brad Kaup.

“He had never swam (competitively) before in his life or played water polo,” Pelton said. “We began working with him in September and he is presently seeded in the top 10 in 50(-yard) freestyle.”

Pelton’s style is a mix of technique and mystique.

Before each season, he has his swimmers write out their goals on a card. It’s required reading before they go to bed each night.

“It’s all a matter getting yourself to believe,” Pelton said. “If you want to be the CIF champion in the 200 IM . . . sure, as you’re saying it, it’s fantasy in your mind. But you create a subconscious that does not know the difference between reality and fantasy.”

He’s selling again.