SWIMMING / THERESA MUNOZ : Kubiak Makes Sure Accardy Will Linger in Coaching Lore

In 24 years as coach at Cal State Northridge, Pete Accardy turned marginal swimmers into champions. The NCAA Division II Coach of the Decade (1980s) won nine NCAA men’s championships and four women’s titles. He will retire Sept. 1 with a 286-62 men’s dual-meet record and a 139-28 women’s mark.

Accardy’s most successful swimmer, Jeff Kubiak, won seven national titles from 1985-87 and earned a gold medal in the 1987 Pan American Games.

When Kubiak enrolled at Northridge, his 200-yard breaststroke time was 2 minutes 10 seconds. By the end of the season he was 10 seconds faster and the winner of the NCAA Division II 200 breaststroke title.

“Pete was real smart about looking at the average athlete and having the feeling that that person could be turned into someone great,” Kubiak said. “Not a lot of college swimming coaches do that. He made me see that I could be much better.”

Kubiak compares Accardy favorably with Texas Coach Eddie Reese, the 1992 U.S. Olympic men’s coach who has a knack for winning national titles without blue-chip recruits.

Although Accardy, 52, will be missed, his influence lives on. As head age group coach at Napa Valley, Kubiak uses Accardy’s practice plans and emulates his philosophy.

The coaching change in the USC women’s program, from Darrell Fick to Mark Schubert, is the primary reason the Trojans landed the nation’s top recruit, Kristine Quance of Northridge.

A six-time national champion, Quance had narrowed her choices to two-time defending NCAA champion Stanford, UCLA and Arizona. She nearly signed with Stanford last fall, but was persuaded to wait amid rumors that Schubert, the men’s coach, would take over as women’s coach and combine the programs. When the rumors proved true, Quance signed with USC.

She is convinced that Schubert, the 1992 U.S. Olympic women’s coach, can best prepare her for the ’96 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

“Missing out on ’92 makes ’96 so important now,” said Quance, who was slowed at the ’92 trials by mononucleosis. “I want not just to make the (Olympic) team, but to do well in Atlanta. That’s my No. 1 goal.

“It was a hard decision because at Stanford you’re pretty much guaranteed an NCAA ring, but an Olympic medal is more important.”

Schubert’s decision to combine the programs at USC gives Quance the opportunity to train in the same lanes with Trojan men who swim her specialties--the individual medleys and breaststroke. In a single-gender program, few women would be able to keep pace with Quance and complete the same workouts.

“I didn’t want to be stuck in a lane by myself,” Quance said.

Stanford did its best to allay her concerns. Cardinal women’s Coach Richard Quick arranged for men’s Coach Skip Kenney to telephone Quance and assure her that she could train with his team.

“But I didn’t want to be juggled back and forth between teams,” Quance said.

The move to combine the men’s and women’s teams at USC represents a major departure from tradition. The longevity and success of the men’s program (founded in 1923, winner of nine NCAA titles) compared to that of the women’s program (founded in 1973, no NCAA titles) made the men “relatively chauvinistic,” according to Peter Daland, men’s coach for 35 years.

As swimmer Cindy Makens described it, members of the men’s and women’s teams are friends, but they professed a strong dislike for each other’s teams. Given their history, it might have taken a few seasons for the men and women to respect, trust and depend on each other as teammates.

The tragic death April 17 of women’s team member Megan Holliday has accelerated the unification process, according to Makens and assistant Sippy Woodhead Kantzer.

Members of both teams rushed to the hospital after Holliday slipped and fell outside her second-story residence. In pairs, they visited her throughout the night and the next morning.

The executive board of U.S. Swimming, the national governing body of the sport, will meet next week to discuss a proposal to restore national team director Dennis Pursley’s autonomy. Eight former U.S. Olympic coaches, including Daland and Schubert, protested a new organizational structure pushed through by executive director Ray Essick that requires Pursley to answer to sports medicine director John Troup.

The coaches’ misgivings about the research Troup and his staff have been conducting at the International Center for Aquatic Research in Colorado Springs, Colo., led to an inspection by Bill Heusner, a retired exercise physiologist who coached at the University of Minnesota and swam in the 1948 Olympic Games. Heusner recommended a more extensive inspection by three impartial experts.

On another front, the U.S. Olympic Committee has not completed its investigation into U.S. Swimming’s use of $2 million in USOC grants from 1989-92.

Swimming Notes

Brian Kurza ended his career at UCLA with a runner-up finish in the 50-yard freestyle, a fourth-place in the 100 freestyle and as a key part of five relay teams in the NCAA championships. The 200 freestyle relay team of Kurza, Michael Picotte, Kyle Depold and Chris Mann was second to Stanford. It set a school-record of 1 minute 17.94 second in preliminaries. Kurza was defeated in the 50 freestyle by David Fox of North Carolina State. Fox, seeded first in 1991 and ‘92, finally lived up to his billing with an NCAA record 19.14 seconds, shaving Olympian Matt Biondi’s 1987 NCAA mark of 19.15. . . . Kurza and Picotte were among 11 Southland swimmers selected for the World University Games team that will compete July 9-15 in Buffalo, N.Y., The others are: Richelle Depold, Greg Schaffer and Randy Hartley, UCLA; Kurt Grote and Lars Jorgensen, San Diego; John Keppeler and Kathy Deibler, Mission Viejo Nadadores; Jim Wells, USC, and Valery Calkins of Camarillo. Sheri Stoddard of Rose Bowl Aquatics is an assistant team leader. . . . The Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles is seeking minorities and women ages 15-21 for a free swimming coach leadership program. For details dial (213) 730-9600.