For the Good of the Team

At the New England Championship Finals, Exeter out-touched Andover by 8/10 of a second in the final 400 Free Relay to win. Final score Exeter 358, Andover 325.

Under coach Jean Chase Farnum, girls swimming and diving has one of the best records of any Academy team. After years of being competitive-a long string of second-place finishes-the girls won the New England Interscholastic Championships in 1997,1998, and 2000. Reclaiming the New England title wasn't easy, but Farnum doesn't believe the team needed to finish first to be a success. Before any major meet and especially before the New England Championships she tells the girls that they need to go into the competition with the attitude that, as a team, they will be trying to do the absolute best that they can. The final outcome will be the cumulative efforts of each and every competitor and a little bit of luck-hopefully "good" luck!

Farnum spoke with The Bulletin, during a break between swimming and diving practices. The swimmers had just completed an intense workout. Three weeks more of specialized training-distance swimmers doing longer yardage and sprinters doing explosive drills-then the girls will begin to "taper," she explains, using coaching jargon to describe how athletes participating in individual sports pace their training to achieve their best performances.

"Swimming is a sport for people who like to push themselves," she says, "and the girls are committed to that." Many girls come from school or club teams where they were used to swimming three or four hours a day. Here at Exeter, they are in the water two hours a day during a season that begins before Thanksgiving, then breaks, and doesn't really get started until January. "In this limited amount of time," she explains, "we still have a quality program that gives girls who have been competitive swimmers since childhood a chance to progress in the sport." Being Exonians, achievement levels are high, she notes, because they bring to swimming the same motivation they bring to the classroom.

The situation is no different with divers, she says, although many of the school's better divers were not involved in the sport before Exeter. Here too, the girls are driven to perform. She proudly notes that her two senior divers have been with her for four years. Farnum trains divers using on-deck videotaping and a trampoline. As with any sport, divers reach plateaus. That's when Farnum shows the diver a tape from an earlier practice. "From year to year, the improvement is enormous," she says.

Farnum is comfortable coaching the two sports, although they have very little in common. She competed in both at the college level, as well as in tennis, which she coaches at Exeter in the spring. But when asked to think about the essential ingredient in sports that she would like to pass along to the athletes she coaches, she goes back to her days playing basketball in high school. "I was always troubled to explain," she said, "why individual sports didn't have spirit the way team sports did. I want my girls to think of themselves as a team and not just as individuals striving to achieve a personal best time or knock off a strong opponent. I work very hard to develop this mentality." Lane work demonstrates this concept, she says. "Swimmers working on their specialties are grouped in lanes at practice. To become adept at lane work, the girls have to have a sense of each other, both their distance from one another and the speed at which they are swimming. They have to respect each other's space. They have to push, yet support, each other."

Farnum continues to nurture ties to the Academy and to the sport in the athletes she coached. Three years ago, after spending several sessions learning how to design a web page, she put up a roster and photos of current team members and a meet schedule. This past year, she researched the 27 seasons of girls swimming at Exeter and built more links: captains, season statistics, and school and New England records-some still held by Exonians. The web page is archival, there for everyone, but especially for teams from years back, she says.

While she has trained many talented athletes in her 18 years at PEA, her goal has always been to bring her swimmers through the program-to not let them burn out-and to motivate them to continue in the sport in college if they so desire. That's a long journey for a prep swimmer, but the goal shows the respect she has for her girls and explains why she remains for many of them an important, formative teacher-coach-mentor.

—Janice M. Reiter

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