Page 32 - Coffee County

the time was right to bring in even more students. Having a knowledgeable and willing local coach was icing on the cake. “C.M. is a good coach and he has contacts around the state. It was going to be a good ft,” says Brunel.

In 2010, Jenkins began recruiting swimmers for the frst-ever SGC swim team. The season would start in November, so he didn’t have much time to get going. “Our initial goal was just to get the numbers. I wanted at least eight men and eight women,” recalls Jenkins. His recruiting efforts paid off; he ended up with 17 swimmers on the team. Once he had his team in place, he had two more goals — he wanted both the men and women’s teams to have 3.0 team grade point averages and he wanted the teams to fnish top 10 in the nation.

Aggressive goals, to be sure, especially for a frst-year team.

However, Jenkins was familiar with nearly all of his recruits. They were either local kids or swimmers against which his teams had competed. He had researched the national junior college swimming landscape and knew what it would take to fnish among the nation’s elite squads. Though his was a frst-year team, he knew they could compete well if they did what they were supposed to do.

Swimming is one of the sports deemed “minor” by most programs. There is, however, nothing minor about the way a competitive swim team trains. Jenkins put the aqua Tigers through their paces — pre-season weight room workouts, 6 a.m. sessions in the pool followed by two-hour practices later in the day, and three-hour practices on Friday and Saturday. The SGC swimmers worked as hard as any team in the state. The kids seemed to understand what Jenkins and his assistant, Emily Horne, were trying to accomplish. They bought into their plan and followed their coaches’ instructions to the letter. “They raised their practice level from what they were used to in high school and experienced immediate success,” states Jenkins.

Success was indeed immediate. At the Tigers’ frst meet of the year, they competed against nine other schools — each one a four-year institution. SGC was the only junior college at the meet. The men ended up fnishing in fourth place. “I saw we could be really competitive. I felt like the women could be good as well. As the season wore on, I saw that a top 10 fnish was realistic,” says Jenkins. Before the Tigers could fnish in the top 10 in the nation, their swimmers had to qualify for the national meet, which would take place