Different Strokes

It was a deliciously ironic bit of marketing genius.

Somebody in the Mission Viejo Co., a subsidy of tobacco giant Phillip Morris, decided the squeaky-clean image of a swim team would help boost sales in their upscale planned community during the early 1970s. Lithe young men and women, disciplined, disinfected and sculpted by churning through several miles in a pool every day was an enticing image to potential home buyers with flower-generation kids. So a little cigarette money was pushed into the hands of the Mission Viejo Nadadores.

And a little cigarette money went a long, long way, even in an Olympic-sized pool.

In June of 1972, a 23-year-old former breaststroker from the University of Kentucky who had one year of high school coaching experience was named coach of the Nadadores, then little more than an age-group summer program. The 50-meter pool, the diving well and the Marguerite International Swim Complex existed only on blueprints.

But Mark Schubert, a slight young man who developed into a sort of miniature Woody Hayes on the pool deck, had huge aspirations. Before accepting the job, he asked Mission Viejo Co. officials to agree to pay the way of any Nadadores swimmer who qualified for nationals.

Somehow, they managed to keep a straight face while agreeing and four years later, they were smiling instead of smirking.

In 1976, they had to pay for five of Schubert’s swimmers’ trip to Montreal to compete in the Olympics. Two of them--Shirley Babashoff and Brian Goodell--brought home suitcases laden with gold and silver. Another four years hence, they dipped into corporate funds to pay housing and meal costs for 60 swimmers who had qualified for the Olympic trials.

“When I first brought up the idea of them paying for trips to the nationals, I’m sure they considered it a very remote possibility,” said Schubert, now the swim coach at USC, “but they always paid, willingly and enthusiastically.” You bet they did. Even the most optimistic of marketing whizzes could not have speculated about the magnitude of name recognition those lean, clean, smelling-of-chlorine Nadadores brought to Mission Viejo.

“As a member of the Nadadores, I represented Mission Viejo all over the world,” Goodell said, “and there are countries that would die to have a team like the Nadadores.”

Mission Viejo had become Mecca for world-class swimmers. Parents of young prodigies moved in from all points on the globe. Older swimmers with heavy-medal dreams made the trek alone, living with host families. As a result, the Nadadores won at least one national team title--mostly in bunches of three (men’s, women’s and combined)--every year from 1974 to 1987 on their way to a record 47.

The Nadadores had become the swim club against which all others would be measured. The rival Irvine Novaquatics, now one of the nation’s stronger club teams starring marquee breaststroker Amanda Beard, has three Olympic medals and two American records to their credit.

Nadadores swimmers have set 91 American and 22 world records, won 12 Olympic gold medals, six silver and one bronze, and 135 of them have become NCAA All-Americans.

Pennies From Heaven

When the Marlboro Man’s money was flowing like water, Schubert routinely sent plane tickets to unattached college swimmers so they could compete as Nadadores in the national championships. It was perfectly within the rules. So what if they had to be introduced to their teammates on the first day of competition?

As a result, Mission Viejo usually clinched all three titles about midway through the four-day national meets. Without the rent-a-swimmers, they might have had to wait until the third day to celebrate.

“We took a lot of heat for that, but most of them came out and swam with us in the summer,” Schubert said. “It was always my intention to have the better college kids training with better high school kids. Racing against college swimmers in summer was a key factor in our younger swimmers’ superior results.”

In August of 1985--right after the Nadadores had broken Santa Clara’s record by winning their 44th national title--Schubert left Mission Viejo to start a new program, the Mission Bay Makos, in Boca Raton, Fla. His new salary made him the highest-paid swimming coach in the country.

The Nadadores won three more national titles over the next two years, but real estate sales were plummeting and corporate funding was being reduced every year.

When Mission Viejo became a city in 1988, the most benevolent benefactor in the history of U.S. swimming was no longer sponsoring the Nadadores. In 1991, the Mission Viejo Co. traded the swim complex and its other recreation centers to the city for a couple of office buildings.

Terry Stoddard, now coach at Rose Bowl Aquatics in Pasadena, followed Schubert at Mission Viejo and spent seven hellish years trying to live up to unrealistic expectations. He was a swim coach who spent more time crunching numbers than training athletes.

“My job with the Mission Viejo Co. was to spin the team out financially over a period of seven years,” he said. “And when I finished, the company turned the team over to the parents.”

In the Wake

A few miles north on the 5 freeway, a fledgling swim program was on the verge of realizing some of the benefits of its grass-roots beginnings.

It was a slow, inglorious process for the Irvine Novaquatics, until 1990, when the club’s board of directors--spurned by their first choice or coaches--decided to take a chance on Dave Salo.

Salo, then an assistant men’s coach at USC who had just completed his doctorate in exercise physiology, came south with a lot of interesting baggage: a vast technical knowledge of the workings of the human body, a reputation as strictly a “boys” coach, what many perceived to be a totalitarian approach to running a swim program and, most shocking of all to traditionalists, a firm belief that more was not necessarily better when it came to training.

“When I got here in 1990, they had a fairly strong senior program, but we lost a lot of the senior-level kids,” Salo said. “I’d say 75% of the girls left. It wasn’t a personality conflict, it’s just that my training regimens were pretty radical compared to what they were doing at Mission [Viejo] and a lot of other programs.

“I don’t believe you have to do the volume that most high-yardage coaches do. My background, all my training, is in physiology and the bottom line is that you can train long and slow or fast and less and basically reach the same point.”

Salo took hold of the Novas’ age-group program and quickly proved the benefits of his training regimen. Irvine won the boys’, girls’ and combined titles at the 1992 Junior Olympics--an age-group competition against Southern California’s best swimmers--and has won every one since.

Olympic gold medalist Beard is Salo’s most obvious success story, but the Novas are more than one world-class swimmer and an armada of speedy 12-year-old sprinters.

At the spring senior national championships, the Novas’ men’s and women’s teams combined to finish third, half a point out of second. At the summer senior nationals, they finished 13th, but Jason Lezak, a former standout at Irvine High who swims for UC Santa Barbara, qualified for the World University Games in the men’s 400 freestyle relay.

“I have friends who are used to doing 10,000 [yard] workouts and then they do 4,000 with us and say, ‘Wow, that’s really hard,’ ” Beard said. “I’ve done those longer workouts in camps and stuff, and they’re just not for me. I’d much rather put in more effort and get more out of it.”

But Salo made his share of waves imposing his will on the Novas, and says he was fortunate during the first couple of years because the club’s board of directors was always supportive. Well, at least the board members who stuck around.

Those who were “adamantly opposed” to his coaching philosophy, he says, had the good sense to “resign from the board rather than disrupt the club.”

“Yes, Dave is very strong-willed and he outwardly gives the impression that it’s ‘my way or the highway,’ ” Novas president Kim Hoestery said. “But I’ve learned that he does listen.

“Sometimes, if you plant the seed, you may not see the result immediately, but he’ll take it under consideration.”

Fast in a Hurry

Salo, who recently turned down a lucrative offer from the well-funded Phoenix Swim Club in order to maintain the mission in Irvine, doesn’t mind taking a swipe at the Nadadores: “I have no desire to create a bunch of mediocre distance swimmers if I can create great sprinters.”

Salo’s training tactics have clearly been proved in the age-group ranks, thanks in some part to an obvious reason that has nothing to do with kinesiology: A kid doesn’t have to spend as many hours staring at hairballs on the bottom of the pool to win a blue ribbon.

“In any other traditional program, Amanda Beard never would have continued swimming,” Salo said. “It’s that simple. In the heyday of swimming at Mission, the kids were willing to do more because they wanted to be in Mark’s [training] group and they knew they had to do what he wanted to be there.

“It’s a different era now and the swimming environment is the most important aspect. Amanda’s where she is today because she was able to swim fast and practice hard, but not practice as much.”

Word traveled faster than the guys in the 50-meter Olympic final and the Novas’ ranks have swelled to 550, with little spacing between swimmers in the lanes at Heritage Park and University and Laguna Hills high schools.

They want very much to build a new pool complex, but these days corporate sponsors aren’t very interested in sports that make Page 1 of the sports section for one week every four years. So Hoestery is forming a nonprofit organization that would help the city raise the $5 million or so needed to house the burgeoning legions.

“Dave’s done a really good job of marketing his strengths,” said Mary Jo Swalley, executive director of Southern California Swimming. “Auburn won the [men’s] NCAA title this year by dominating the 50 [-meter freestyle], the 100 free and the four sprint relays. A good sprinter is worth more to a college coach these days than a good distance swimmer.”

Dreams of becoming the next Amanda Beard are there, but the most pragmatic goal of all young swimmers is a college scholarship. So why not take the fast track?

“The biggest change in club swimming since Mark left Mission is that the kids who go off to college rarely come back,” Salo said. “It hurt U.S. swimming because basically we’re left with 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old girls to make the impact.

“Much like Mission Viejo once did, we’ve managed to attract a lot of those best swimmers in the area.”

The theories behind Salo’s training techniques may be complex, but the formula for Irvine’s success has been simple, according to Hoestery.

“Dave has provided the training environment that has allowed these kids to come in and succeed,” she said, “and it’s not just Dave. The age-group program has really blossomed under [former UC Irvine swimmer] Brian Pager and we have Brent Lorenzen, who graduated from Harvard and just finished his master’s at Cal. I’m sure we have the best educated group of coaches in the state.

“Now, we’ve been drawing the top-notch swimmers. And we haven’t recruited them, they’ve sought us out because our program has sort of replaced Mission Viejo in that way. And I think everyone is convinced that you don’t have to pound the yardage if you train with enough intensity.”

Going to Lengths

Well, not everyone.

Bill Rose--the man who was hired five years ago to help the Nadadores crawl back on top--believes you can see miles and miles behind the most successful swimmers.

And his approach to training has shown its worth. Rose transformed the 37-member Pacific Aquatic Club in Stockton into a thriving team of 235 in the ‘60s and turned a club in DeAnza, Calif., into a 647-member army in the ‘70s. Then he left coaching to make some money as a stockbroker.

“His heart was always at the pool,” says wife Siga, an assistant coach with the Nadadores.

He returned to take over the new Nadadores with an old-line stance: Nobody wants to swim 12 miles a day; nobody wants to swim against somebody who does.

“I don’t believe in a lot of the stuff we’ve done in this country over the past 10 years,” Rose said, “this trend toward trying to work faster and work less, to save energy and time in the name of efficiency. The Novas are a sprint-based club and they’re very proud of that. We’re equally proud of our over-distance approach because we think the distance base pays the best dividend.

“We’re talking about totally opposite training philosophies and the ultimate result is where the debate comes in. I think it’s clear that a sprint-type training approach with younger swimmers will produce more immediate results, but my addendum to that is, our over-distance base training will give better ultimate results.

“It allows a swimmer to perform better at a later age when they’re more developed physically and at a point where they can reach an ultimate best time in their event.”

After maturing, a swimmer can go down to shorter events if they seem more suited to sprinting, according to Rose, but a youngster who has been a sprinter all through the age-group process is very unlikely to develop into a distance swimmer later.

Rose, who began his stint at Mission Viejo with 197 swimmers and now has more than 700--a number swelled by about 200 or so by short summer programs--is also more than a little miffed about the idea that the Nadadores have taken a back seat to the Novas in Orange County. Mission Viejo has won five of the last seven Junior National Championships, a more prestigious national event than the Southland-only Junior Olympics.

However, at this year’s Junior Nationals, the Nadadores finished eighth overall, the Novaquatics first.

“All 14 high school seniors in our senior group received full athletic scholarships this year,” Rose said. “Is that some kind of failure?”

He’s also rankled at the notion that if you swim with the Nadadores, you’ll only be swimming English Channel-like distances.

“Of those 14 swimmers who got scholarships, six are sprinters,” Rose said. “Lisa Jacob has been swimming here since she was 6 and won two relay gold medals in the last Olympics. So why aren’t I a sprinting coach?

“We won both breaststroke events at the [1996] Junior Championships. So I guess I’m a breast-stroke coach.”

Isn’t Beard a breaststroker?

“You’re a great coach at something, depending on what your talent gives you,” Rose says. “Look, we would love to have an Amanda Beard, that can be huge for a program.

“But you also have to give them credit. They do a great job of selling their philosophy and they’re plucking some of the best young age-groupers from all the clubs in Southern California. You compound that with a program based on immediacy and, without a doubt, they’re showing the best results on the age-group level.”

Who Needs Parity?

Will the Novaquatics eventually rule as the Nadadores once did? Will the Nadadores regain their reign?

Probably not. Not unless Tiger Woods decides he would look really cool in Speedos. Without more than pocket-change corporate sponsorship, both clubs are strictly parent-driven, existing only because of a huge, dedicated army of volunteers.

You’ll see people camping out to buy a house again before you’ll see another team like the one Schubert--wearing a tie-dyed yellow-and-blue shirt so his swimmers could see him spur them on when they took a breath--commanded during those glory years.

And Schubert thinks it’s sad.

“When Mission was the biggest and the best, it served as a magnet,” he said. “I just think of Mike O’Brien as a 15-year-old trying to beat Brian Goodell, his idol, in practice every day, and I have to wonder if he ever would have won an Olympic gold medal if he hadn’t had that daily challenge and inspiration.

“There are a lot of good clubs and the talent is so spread out now. It’s good for the sport that whole families don’t have to be up-rooted or children separated from their families to get to a promising kid into a good program with good coaching.

“But it’s also a shame that we don’t have so many of the best athletes training together anymore . . . and we probably never will.”