Page 30 - Coffee County

ne question that has been asked of the South Georgia College athletic department since 2003 is, why doesn’t the college have a swim team? The most expensive component of any swimming program is the facility itself. SGC has had an indoor junior Olympic swimming pool since 2003. With the biggest hurdle cleared, it made sense to fll the pool with South Georgia College swimmers. At least that’s the way things looked from the outside. Internally, there were other issues. First, junior college swimming is not one of the most popular sports out there. Few junior colleges have swim teams, and fnding teams against which to compete could be problematic. Another problem is a lack of interest in swimming throughout southern Georgia. Eight years ago, not many high schools in South Georgia (or anywhere else outside of the metro areas) had viable swim teams. The sport was beginning to catch on in the state, but it wasn’t there yet.

In short, the time just wasn’t right. In that regard, SGC was ahead of its time. The school had a state-of-the-art facility, but there wasn’t really a way to utilize it — not from a competitive standpoint. Since then, swimming has taken off throughout the area. The Douglas Stingrays summer program has been very competitive, and it has generated a completely new crop of talented swimmers for the Coffee High School team. Swimming has become more visible in other communities, as well; now plenty of schools outside of the big cities have swim teams.

After several years, the time for SGC swimming had fnally arrived. Over the last

few years, the SGC athletic program has added a few sports to its stable of teams. Cross Country was frst in 2008. Two years later, SGC Athletic Director Rob Brunel and the school’s president, Dr. Virginia Carson, began discussing adding even more sports. The two chosen were swimming and golf. “I felt like with our pool already in place, swimming would be easy to add. We also had a local coach who was interested in taking the team if we ever started one,” says Brunel. The coach was C.M. Jenkins, an educator in the public school system who had been involved in the local swimming scene for many years. He, along with Barbara Joiner, had coached the Stingrays and the Coffee High team. Jenkins would be retiring from the school system at the end of the 2010-2011 school year and would be available. “In the previous fve years, there hadn’t been much talk of swimming. The right opportunity came along at the right time,” says Brunel. In 2010, he sat down with Dr. Carson and started discussing the budgeting needs of a swim team.

Adding sports is a great way for a college to boost enrollment — if the ever-present fnancials can be worked out. Each student-athlete brings an average of 1.5 students to campus as well; in short, more athletes equal more non-athletes. The athletic department had been stagnant for several years; the college had more to offer student-athletes than just baseball, soccer, and softball. With almost 600 new residence hall beds on campus in the Tiger Village I and II facilities,