The Morning Swim Show, Feb. 16, 2012: Scott Lemley’s Women’s Team at Alaska Improving Each Year

PHOENIX, Arizona, February 16. ON today's edition of The Morning Swim Show, Alaska women's swimming head coach Scott Lemley talks about his team's preparations for the upcoming Division II NCAA championships.

For the first time in the program's seven-year history, a relay has earned an automatic qualification to the NCAA meet, and Lemley talks about that relay and other swimmers that could go to the meet, which he says will be mostly a learning experience. Lemley also talks about the difficulties of recruiting swimmers to Fairbanks, and the best time of the year to bring them north. Be sure to visit SwimmingWorld.TV for more video interviews.

Special Thanks to Finis for sponsoring the Morning Swim Show's interview segments in the Finis Monitor.
Download The FINIS Custom Suit Catalog
Download The FINIS 2012 Product Catalog
Visit Finis to learn more about their innovative products for aquatic athletes.

Morning Swim Show Transcripts
Sponsored by Competitor Swim Products
www.competitorswim.com

(Note: This is an automated service where some typos and grammatical errors may occur.)

Peter Busch: This is The Morning Swim Show for Thursday, February 16th 2012. I'm your host Peter Busch. In the FINIS monitor today we'll talk to Scott Lemley. He's the head coach at the University of Alaska's Women's Swim Team. They are getting ready for the Division II national championships coming up next month. Coach Lemley joins us right now in the FINIS monitor from Fairbanks, Alaska. Coach, welcome to The Morning Swim Show. How are you?

Scott Lemley: I'm great. How are you?

Peter Busch: Good. I think this might be our first Morning Swim Show via Alaska. It's great to have you.

Scott Lemley: Well I'm happy to have the opportunity to talk about our program.

Peter Busch: Well it sounds like you guys are having one of the best years so far – you've got a relay already with an automatic qualifying cut for the D2 national championships, you're 800 for relay. In fact according to our research you're second in the country right now.

Scott Lemley: It looks pretty strong.

Peter Busch: So what do you attribute that to, just good old fashioned building the program and it's finally coming around?

Scott Lemley: You know that's a big part of it. This is our seventh year and in a sense the planets are starting to align, we've got good support from the administration, we've got a little more notoriety each year with the success we've had, but really it kind of starts with the recruiting and any coach will tell you that recruiting is the lifeblood of the college coach and it was a really good recruiting year. We got 12 freshmen that came in and five girls qualified so far, four freshmen and one is a sophomore so it's a very young enthusiastic team.

Peter Busch: Is it difficult to recruit kids to Alaska?

Scott Lemley: As you might imagine, it is. We have to pick the right time to bring them up. If you bring them up in January and it's 35-below unless they're a winter sports person that's probably not the right time to bring them up so we try to bring girls up on their official visit in October when there's still a lot of light and you can actually see grass.

Peter Busch: Well tell us about the university itself. Again, it's not one that we talk about very often.

Scott Lemley: I came up here to swim back in 1970 and I liked it so much that I've stayed for the better part of the last 42 years. It's a small campus, it's very friendly, it's a very good school academically so that combination and the support we get from the athletic department is exactly what I was looking for and we really try to find young women with a sense of adventure that really we put through school and are good athletes and that's who we've ended up with.

Peter Busch: The program has it only been around for seven years or have you been the coach for seven years?

Scott Lemley: Well I swam up here when it was an NAIA program in the early ‘70s. We had a men's team back in the mid-‘80s and I was the head coach of the men's team and then it went by the wayside, just budget cuts and things like that, so when they started this new program — it was more or less a Title IX program – they asked me if I would build it from the ground up because that's what I did with the men's team 20 years ago. I had been the only head coach of this new women's team now on its 7th year and I was the only head coach of the men's team back in the ‘80s.

Peter Busch: I guess it's similar to Hawaii for example, it's not as easy to fly just an hour and catch a dual meet. How many dual meets do you swim and where do you go?

Scott Lemley: Well it's actually less expensive for us to pay teams to come up and swim against us. It takes a day to get out, a day to get back, and then a day to swim a meet. I'll contact coaches that I know and we'll bring teams up, we'll give them guarantees for their flight, we'll put them up in camp hotel rooms, all they have to do is come up with the money for transportation and food which is what they would do anyway so the majority of our dual meets are done here in Fairbanks and then to get our money's worth we'll swim a Friday evening meet and then a Saturday noon meet so we sleep in our own beds, we don't miss class, the teams that come up and swim against us find it's pretty exotic, they use as a recruiting tool when they know that we're on the schedule for them next year so it works for great for us just to go outside for conference and then for a big invitational at the end of the fall semester.

Peter Busch: What kind of facilities do you have?

Scott Lemley: It's an older pool, it's a six-lane pool, no diving well, it's a fast pool, we keep the water cold, it's a really great training pool. It's not super impressive when you see it for the first time, but I trained here 40 years ago, every team and every swimmer that's ever swum in this pool knows it's a great facility but it's not an indoor 50-meter pool. It makes it a little challenging to recruit in terms of the facility but it's also about the program in terms of the school itself and the town really lends itself to bringing athletes up and impressing them.

Peter Busch: But it is indoors?

Scott Lemley: There are no outdoor pools in Alaska.

Peter Busch: No retractable roof on it so that for a couple of months you can see the blue sky?

Scott Lemley: No big wide bubbling over an outdoor pool, no.

Peter Busch: You can watch the Aurora Borealis while you're doing backstroke.

Scott Lemley: You know that is one of the – it's like the eighth wonder of the world and a lot of the girls we bring up here they find that that's one of the attractions, the hiking, we do a raft trip on some pretty wild rivers in the fall, but you do have to have that sense of adventure. And then once you're up here you do get to – you see the moose walking across campus and you see the northern lights and it's pretty spectacular.

Peter Busch: It can't beat the natural beauty that's for sure.

Scott Lemley: Yes.

Peter Busch: What kind of program would you describe yours as? Is it high volume, do you do a lot of technical stuff, what kind of coach are you?

Scott Lemley: Well it's a very simple formula. Over the years I've found that if swimmers can learn to stay focused mentally and stay relaxed physically then good things happen. We don't do garbage yards, we do very focused swimming. Every single set has a single focus so that the girls know what they're working on and it's all about fundamentals – learning how to streamline off the walls, learning how to lunge to the finish, staying relaxed, and finding that flow when they swim. We don't do anything real tricky, we just really focus on the fundamentals.

Peter Busch: Tell us about some of the girls that we'll see at the D2 championships.

Scott Lemley: Well the program kind of right now is based on a girl that we recruited last year. She would be a true freshman this year but she came to our program in January last year, Bente Heller. She's a German girl from Hamburg. She's highly ranked in the 50, 100, 200 freestyles. She's a big part of our relay, our freestyle relay. She is our anchor. Then the rest of the girls are freshmen. We have a freshman from Canada who's highly ranked in both IMs and the 200free. We have a freshman from Anchorage, a girl who I've watched swim all through high school. She's I think ranked third right now nationally in the 100fly. And then we have a girl from Wyoming who's kind of our freestyle, 200free, 500free, 400IM. And then a breaststroker from Fresno – we don't usually recruit from Southern California just because it's not an easy sell and what they're used to is white sand and not white snow on the ground and she's our breaststroker. Four freshmen and a sophomore – that's kind of the core of our team right now. Since they're so young and this will be the first time any of them have been to nationals it's more of an exploratory trip this year, we're just going to go and have fun and see what happens.

Peter Busch: Well Coach glad to hear that things are moving in the right direction for your program.

Scott Lemley: I appreciate that.

Peter Busch: And good luck at the championships and congratulations.

Scott Lemley: Thanks very much.

Peter Busch: All right. That's Coach Scott Lemley joining us from the University of Alaska and that is it for today's show. I'm Peter Busch reminding you to keep your head down at the finish.

Subscribe to this show FREE via iTunes!

To purchase this or previous episodes of The Morning Swim Show, to send comments or show suggestions, click here to send an email.

To purchase copies of our Ready Room interviews, click here.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

Welcome to our community. We invite you to join our discussion. Our community guidelines are simple: be respectful and constructive, keep on topic, and support your fellow commenters. Commenting signifies that you agree to our Terms of Use

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x