Swim Coach
It is estimated that over the course of his career as a swim coach, RT trained thousands of youngsters, mostly minority, to swim. Regardless of whether any of them went on to win swimming competitions at any level – many did – all of them learned a new skill and self-confidence to take on new challenges which might have at first seemed very scary.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
RT was born in New York City. His father was a clothes presser. His mother was a homemaker.
CHILDHOOD INTERESTS
RT was scared of the ocean the first time he encountered it, when he was 8. But he soon learned to swim at a club in the Bronx section of the city.
Said RT later, “I had a swim coach who had a real mosaic team: Hispanics, Blacks, Polish and Italians.” But he noticed that most of his competitors at swim meets were White.
EDUCATION – PART ONE
RT was the first Black swim team captain at his city’s public high school.
While swimming for his high school team, RT competed with an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team and became a lifeguard.
MILITARY
After his high school graduation, RT enlisted in the military, where he served in the Army’s famous 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. For several of his Army years, RT taught officers’ wives and children how to swim.
EDUCATION – PART TWO
After RT’s Honorable Discharge from the Army, he returned to New York city, where he attended a local college for two years.
CAREER PATH
During his college years, RT and a friend started a swim team called “The Finmen.” This program trained young swimmers who eventually became Junior Olympic champions, all-state swimmers, and N.C.A.A. All-Americans, to compete in swim meets in the New York area and elsewhere on the East Coast.
Coaching the swim team was initially only an unpaid, volunteer hobby so RT found a paying job as a subway motorman, which provided sufficient financial income to support himself while allowing him to pursue his passion for providing an opportunity for children to learn to swim and to compete as a swimmer if they were interested beyond learning how to survive in the water.
Among RT’s many paid positions as a swim coach, was to serve as an assistant coach under his daughter, who was the head coach at a college. One of their swimmers said “He was funny, he was a sharpshooter and never held back when it came to giving you feedback and releasing your potential. After that swimmer’s freshman year in college, she began to coach and later started a new program, “Black People Will Swim” which encourages Black and Brown people to overcome their fear of swimming. “His example definitely inspired me to coach,” said RT’s former college swim team member.
Eventually, RT’s reputation as a successful swim coach attracted the attention of an organization called “U.S.A. Swimming” which hired him to work with minority kids. RT took the job, intent on making a difference in the lives of the young swimmers. Said RT, “My thing has always been that I will give you what you need, and you work for what you want.”
One of his youngest swimmers was brought to RT at age 3, to be helped to overcome the child’s fear of the water. “Coach took him screaming and trying to hold on to me for dear life, just dragged him away,” said the lad’s father. “Within an hour, my son was in the water like nothing had happened and two days later he was swimming laps across the pool using a flat board.”
Fifteen years before the first Black swimmer (Anthony Nesty, representing Suriname) won an Olympic gold medal, RT observed that “There’s never been a great Black competitive swimmer, not because they can’t swim but because they don’t have easy access to pools, camps, trainers.
RT believed strongly in bringing swimming to minority youths, many of whom had never been exposed to the sport in their urban home neighborhoods.
Editor’s note – Simone Manuel of the United States was the first Black female swimmer to win an individual gold medal, at the 2016 Summer Olympics.
As RT noted, “Basically, swimming is a sport for the wealthy. Every kid plays basketball, but a swimmer needs devotion and self-denial.”
RT’s daughter said: “He wanted to get rid of the myth that Black people can’t swim. He grew up swimming, not seeing someone who looked like him. He felt it was important to see an example of what you can be.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
In 1981, RT started the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Swim Classic, a multicultural event that annually attracts hundreds of swimmers from the U.S. and the Caribbean to Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, Long Island.
In 2014, RT received the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award of U.S.A. Swimming, the national governing body of the sport, for supporting and introducing swimming to underrepresented groups.
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This career story is based on an obituary written by Richard Sandomir, published in The New York Times on 4/18/23.
