Sink and Swim

Scott Law has a rule. When trying out for his Paramount High swim team, one must stay afloat long enough for him to run inside and answer the phone.

That amounts to approximately one-half lap of their 25-meter park pool, about nine thrashing strokes.

If Law has to leap in and pull your gasping, choking body to the pool deck before that, you are cut.

But if you can survive that long, well, last year the coach dragged an exhausted kid from the bottom of the pool near the end of his first tryout lap and welcomed him to the squad.

“I take kids on the basis of who’s not sinking,” Law said.

Scott Law has another rule. Those on his swim team must wear a swim suit.

No cutoffs. No gym shorts. No boxer shorts. And absolutely no shirts.

Some of the school’s most promising male athletes refuse to join his team because they won’t wear the tiny Speedos. Some of his girls are uncomfortable being ogled by the men who wander into meets from the nearby park benches.

Nonetheless, since the day a student showed up in basketball gear and a snorkeling mask, Law decided Paramount swimmers should look at least remotely like swimmers.

“It’s tough to swim fast when you are wearing clothes,” the coach said.

Scott Law has one more rule, repeated so much his team knows it by heart.

“Don’t jump off the block, fly off the block.”

This is about not only the start of their races, but the beginning of their adulthood.

Don’t be afraid to try a new stroke, even if it means being a Latino swimmer in an environment where there are few.

Don’t be afraid to use a different kick, even if your dedication is criticized and your sexuality questioned.

Don’t be afraid to stick your

underwater and crawl through a frightening darkness toward a blurry destination. Even if it means you must swallow a little water.

Last week, the thrashers from Paramount High swim team touched a wall that few there thought possible, sending five swimmers to the Southern Section Division IV championships in Long Beach, the most anyone can remember.

They were kids who wore souvenir T-shirts and drove to Belmont Plaza in the back of their coach’s SUV against kids with uniforms and team buses and cheering sections.

Considering the trouble Scott Law has seen in his four years as coach at Paramount, a largely Latino school in a cluttered town tucked by the 710 Freeway in southeast L.A., it was an Olympic-sized splash.

Two Pirate swimmers--one senior whose parents have never seen him in a high school meet, and another who was too worried about failure to even invite his girlfriend--made the consolation finals.

Antonio Martinez Jr. finished 15th in the 100-yard freestyle.

Julio Zepeda finished 15th in the 200-yard freestyle, and 12th in the 100-yard backstroke.

Nobody much noticed either one of them until Zepeda, dripping wet, eyes watering, climbed out of the water and bent over at the waist.

He was not mourning the end, but celebrating the journey.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, folding into his coach’s arms, that destination suddenly not so blurred. “I can’t believe it.”

Who could?

When Law, 29, arrived at Paramount as a biology teacher five years ago, he had no intention of coaching the swim team.

He was a former swimmer at Chapman College, and had coached a couple of girls’ high school teams while working construction after graduation, but his new school was different.

Swimming at a place known for football, in a community where about the only backyard pools were blown up and covered in yellow ducks? Swimming in a culture where, in the words of assistant coach Roberto Guerrero, the biggest obstacle is getting the boys to put on the suit?

“The hardest thing is still the Speedos,” he said. “It has to do with machismo. That’s not a very macho look.”

Law remembers some of his ninth-grade students noticing swim posters on his classroom wall one day, and asking about joining the team.

“I asked them, ‘Do we have a team?’ ” he said.

He later found the pool next door and wandered into a practice where a couple of dozen swimmers worked for about 20 minutes and then splashed around for fun. A couple of weeks later, the coach left, and Law signed up, and the rules changed.

“Swimming is dedication, self-reflection, commitment to something, important stuff for kids to learn,” said Law, a tall, pale, bespectacled man who sticks out like a giant flipper among his students. “It has been such a big part of my life, I didn’t think it was fair that everyone couldn’t have the same opportunity.”

So Law spread the word, and set up his first tryouts, and grabbed his stopwatch, and excitedly drove to the pool . . . where he watched kids sink.

Kids who threw up in the pool after one lap. Kids who tried to make the team by swimming a few strokes and walking the rest of the way.

He would shout for somebody to swim breaststroke, and the person would turn over on his back. Butterfly was done with a freestyle kick. Some kids were afraid to even dive off the blocks.

Law ran out to buy a box of rubber bands for hair, because nobody had a bathing cap. He and wife Jean rummaged through their drawers for old suits, and today some of the kids are still wearing them.

One of the swimmers who qualified for CIF, George Ahumada, spent much of the year using goggles that he found by the side of the pool. When they slipped off his head and into his mouth late this season, he discarded them, and was perhaps the only swimmer in the championship who wore nothing to protect his eyes.

“To be honest with you, I only started swimming because I didn’t want to take another class,” Ahumada said. “It was either take a class and get a ‘D,’ or take swimming and get an ‘A.’ ”

Law rounded up all those who could swim, and made them not just team leaders, but team swimming instructors. For the first weeks of practice, they gave lessons to the others.

“Some of our kids think they are swimming when they’re not even moving,” sophomore Crystal Ruelas said. “But it’s fine. Everybody helps everybody else.”

Then there were the problems with stereotypes.

“People in school said we were gay,”’ Zepeda said. “They think if you are a guy and you swim, you are weird.”

And problems with shaving. Yeah, shaving. Even if his team could barely afford sunscreen, Law insisted that, like regular swimmers, the boys shave their bodies before big meets.

Some parents objected. The curious looks from schoolmates increased. One boy tried to do it himself and shaved his eyebrows.

Law finally arrived at the perfect solution--he ordered the girls to shave the boys. No more gaping cuts. Decreased schoolmate tittering.

“Nobody can argue about a girl shaving your legs,” Zepeda said.

Just when Law thought it could get no worse, his first season started.

Opponents openly snickered at the capsizing Pirates, once even nearly igniting a brawl behind the starting blocks.

“We go to these meets and see a lot of white people, and they were all better than us” junior Daniel Pascua said. “They were yelling that we stunk, and they were right.”

Not that the Pirates were bad, but they were often still in the water when the opponent had finished, climbed out and dried off.

“We’d be the only ones in the pool, and everybody would be cheering for us, but you know they were only being nice,” Pascua said.

Not that the Pirates were inexperienced, but several times they would turn swimming into a contact sport, in events like the 400-yard relay.

Forgetting that each swimmer does four laps, one team member would dive into the pool after his teammate had just finished two laps, landing squarely on top of him.

Law once passed out T-shirts to those relay members and ordered them to mark off each lap on the front of the shirt with a marking pen so they wouldn’t get confused.

“It was crazy, dude,” Zepeda said. “I mean, really crazy.”

The team often would have its score tripled by the opponent. Of 44 events in each dual meet--varsity and junior varsity--the Pirates would sometimes not finish in the top two in any of them.

“Imagine having to go out there every week and know you were going to get embarrassed, and yet to keep doing it,” Law said. “That’s what really impressed me about these kids.”

Law is convinced that it is those tough first years that turned his girls’ team into a 12-1 squad this season, while the boys won five of 12 meets and placed four swimmers in the CIF championships.

“Our kids are resilient for a lot of reasons,” Law said.

They learn this without ever leaving their pool.

Because Law’s success has resulted in the doubling of the team size to 70 members, during practice at least 10 swimmers occupy each of the six lanes, twice the normal number.

It is so crowded, one girl once broke a finger smashing into another girl. Then there are the new swimmers who tire and stop in the middle of the lane, floating there like icebergs, sending the veteran swimmers into Titanic tizzies.

“Sometimes I will just yell, ‘If you’re not going to swim, get out!’ ” Zepeda said. “Some days, you can never go more than two good laps before running into somebody or having to stop.”

The kids trying advanced flip turns sometimes bump their heads in the shallow end. The kids swimming backstroke are sometimes bruised by a piece of jutting pool deck.

When the pool’s filter isn’t working, the swimmers climb out after workouts and spit debris into a nearby trash can. When the pool’s heater isn’t working, they go numb.

Then there’s the problems outside the pool, where taggers once interrupted a meet by spray painting gang signs in the locker room. At least once each season, Law said, he has kept his team in that locker room until gang trouble in the parking lot is settled by police.

Of course, when the pool shuts down for maintenance, the Pirates realize how lucky they are. They move their practices to another park pool where the managers aren’t so understanding, placing 30 in one lane at $1.50 a person.

All of which meant nothing last Thursday, when five members of the Paramount High swim team huddled together outside their pool in preparation for the trip to Belmont Plaza.

They were oblivious to the wealth and privilege that would battle them, unable and unwilling to see any further than the last few inches of the last laps of their season.

Together, they chanted the swim team song, a strange song, a perfect song.

There was a mighty Pirate who sat upon the wall.

He rooted for the other team, he had no faith at all.

He fell into the water and was about the drown.

But his mighty Pirate spirit lifted him off the ground.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.