Calvary Chapel Jumps In Feet First : Swimming: Coach has seven boys and 12 girls, most of them without experience. But in their inaugural season, they’ve set realistic goals.

COSTA MESA — Introducing the 1993 Olympic League champion Calvary Chapel Eagles.

With the wrestling season long since pinned and races in the spring sports still very much in contention, what league title could Calvary Chapel have possibly wrapped up?

“Legitimately, we could crown ourselves league champion,” Calvary Chapel swim Coach Robert Webster said with a grin. “There aren’t any other teams in the league.”

But a mythical league crown can be a useful motivational tool for a team that could barely get from one end of the pool to the other when practice started two months ago.

“Our goal this year is to do our best, learn to be competitive, learn to race,” Webster said. “These kids have different goals, they take a different approach. Completing a workout or finishing hard is a big deal. Here the goal is to finish the race, not necessarily win it.”

Good thing. This is the swim team’s inaugural season, and because of the late start, Webster was lucky to get any meets scheduled.

The problem was that when he did, it was against programs such as Corona del Mar, El Toro, Capistrano Valley and other mismatches of grand proportions.

“Most high schools had already set up their schedules,” Webster said. “I had to call some of my cohorts and ask for favors.”

Some favor. Only a handful of Calvary Chapel’s swimmers had any experience, and none--unlike the competition--had club backgrounds. With seven boys and 12 girls, Webster barely has enough swimmers to fill one roster in any of the three divisions (freshman/sophomore, junior varsity, varsity).

“You need eight to 12 in each division,” he said. “This becomes difficult in a dual meet. We don’t have a fighting chance.”

Yet his team is fighting harder than any he has coached.

Since the school has no pool, the Eagles swim whenever and wherever they can. This means late workouts--6 to 8 p.m. daily--at sites that sometimes change at the last minute.

And because of the tremendous expense of renting pool time, team members joined Pacific Coast Aquatics so they would have pool time.

“When we first started I thought, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ Part of me wasn’t discouraged, but I wasn’t encouraged either,” said Webster, who has coached swimming from club to college and every level between.

“It’s been a humbling experience for me. You go from coaching some of the top athletes in the county to kids who have no background whatsoever. But they listen. They’re great. They’ve made tremendous progress.”

To illustrate where they started and how far they’ve come, Webster tells of an equipment episode during the first week of practice:

“I threw them pull buoys and told them to pull,” he said. “They didn’t know to put them between their legs. That’s a standing joke with coaches, but I found out they really didn’t know.”

Freshman Britta Kappe said even the most basic elements of the sport were beyond the team’s realm of knowledge.

“Nobody knew how to swim circle patterns, nothing. We’ve come a long way,” she said.

Kappe wasn’t the only beginner fighting to keep her head above water when Webster began barking strange-sounding workout orders from the pool deck.

Sophomore Paul Bennett swam in his first meet after one day of practice. Bennett has competed on the Eagles’ football team and State champion wrestling team, but neither sport prepared him for the demands of swimming.

“Football is tiring, but this is exhausting, “ he said. “This is almost like running a marathon.”

Tim Rogers, another former football player and wrestler, seconded the motion.

“The first time we worked out, we swam 200 yards and we were dying,” said Rogers, one of three seniors on the team and Calvary Chapel’s captain. “Now we’re swimming more than 5,000 yards. I’ve always respected swimmers, but now I know what studs they really are.”

Sophomore Amber Larsen, one of the few Calvary Chapel swimmers to join the team with an ounce of experience, is one of the Eagles’ early success stories. She won the varsity 50-yard freestyle and 100 free in a tri-meet against Estancia and Saddleback recently.

But in her first meet, she asked herself what she was doing there.

“In the first meet I got to the other end of the pool and I was dying,” Larsen said. “I thought, why am I doing this? But then you’d go to practice and realize you aren’t going to die. There are so many people around us, building us up.”

And being a team of beginners made it easier to improve together.

“It’s helped that we’re working out with other people who aren’t that good,” Larsen said.

Still, the Eagles have surprised even themselves at times. In their first meet they took four firsts, a couple seconds and a third in the frosh/soph division, and have improved steadily since.

“I think everyone thought we’d be last in every event,” Larsen said. “But in our second and third meets, we didn’t take any last places.”

Realistically, Webster believes only one or two of his athletes will qualify for the Southern Section meet. But his swimmers believe otherwise.

“They hear certain times and they wonder, ‘Is that fast?’ Webster said. “They have no conception of fast. That’s probably a blessing. If they knew what they meant, they’d probably be twice as scared.

“But that’s the beauty behind this team. They think they can drop their times by two or three seconds, where half a second is a tremendous drop in a 50. They don’t have the mind-set that a drop of two seconds is incredible.

“Now, instead of me going into my whole negative attitude of how hard it is to drop that much time, I leave it at, ‘Hey, that’s great. Two and a half seconds in the 50? That’s nothing.’ ”