By Ryan Pretzer

Apparently James Counsilman was not hung up on formalities. You’d think people would call him “Doctor” Counsilman after he received his doctorate’s degree from the University of Iowa in physiology.

Maybe Coach Counsilman would stick after he took over IU’s men’s swimming program in 1957 and stayed there for 33 seasons.

But Counsilman preferred “Doc,” and that’s what everyone called him because everyone, even his rivals, listened to him. Doc? It sounds like a nickname for trainers and waterboys, surely not the head coach, not a coach who won six consecutive NCAA titles and 20 straight Big Ten championships. Doesn’t such mastery of one’s craft demand more respect?

He was the premier swimming coach, not one of the seven dwarfs.

He should have been knighted Sir Doc after, at 58 years old, he swam across the English Channel, the oldest man to accomplish the feat at the time. After all, if swimming had royalty he would be seated at the head of its table - when he got back from the buffet.

“Everyone made a joke you wanted to make sure you never got behind Doc in the smorgasbord line because there wouldn’t be any food left,” said Jeff LeBeau, who swam with Doc in the summertime.

In the end, balding with tufts of white hair on the side, often pictured with thick-framed glasses and a neck tie, “Doc” fit just fine: He had a grandfatherly glow with an expert’s precision. He was a storyteller with tales no one else could tell; a scientist with ideas no one else could imagine.

Those stories and ideas will remind us of Doc, who passed away earlier this month, 83 years old and weakened by his battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Doc the Scientist

Doc must have had special lenses in those glasses; no one looked at the sport like he did. He revealed there was more to swimming than walls and water. He revolutionized how swimmers trained; he was the first coach to have swimmers use pace clocks and swim benches. He even popularized lane lines that have changed the face of the sport.

The U.S. Olympic Coach in 1964 and 1976, Doc led the U.S. team to 48 medals, including 17 gold. His worldview of the sport benefited his swimmers back home.

“He was always talking to us about what other countries were doing, other people were doing, and what we were doing,” LeBeau said. “He always had people coming in, doing experiments. He was continuously doing things to find out why people swam fast.”

Doc’s influence also knew no borders - he would have swum the oceans if he could have. One story he used to tell happened on a fishing trip in China. As his boat headed out of the pier, someone on a passing boat had an IU swimming shirt that read, “What’s up, Doc?”

Doc certainly had grand visions for his sport, but he never lost sight of the swimmers paddling in front of him.

“In the summertime, you would swim your set and he was sitting there on the bench and you didn’t know if he paid attention at all,” LeBeau said. “But you would come out of a set, and he’d say, ‘you did a really good job on that set, on No. 1 you did this time, on No. 2 you did this time...’ He was watching and paid incredible attention to detail.”

Doc analyzed those details using a scientific approach very few coaches were aware of, much less used or understood, in the 1970s and 80s. “He was one of the only people using science to make his swimmers go faster,” LeBeau said. Doc’s book, The Science of Swimming, is still considered the sport’s bible 36 years later.

“I think the most important thing he did was be provocative, question,” current IU head coach Ray Looze said. “I was talking to his wife the other day and she said, ‘Don’t expect a religious service for his memorial,’ and I asked why not. She said, ‘Well, Doc wasn’t a really religious guy. The priest told his mother that he asked too many questions.’”

Doc the Storyteller

As Doc continued his groundbreaking research and his Hoosiers kept winning, a conversation with Doc was on every coach’s wish list. Everyone wanted to bounce ideas off of swimming’s Aristotle. A former IU swimmer told Looze that when the team took a training trip to Florida, every coach asked Doc out to lunch.

“He was such a pioneer, people just wanted to have something to do with him, even if it was just a coach coming here to work for free during the camp to learn from the guy,” Looze said. “If you were an opposing coach, he was always generous with his time, from what I understand. The teacher in him never stopped.”

But Doc always made time for his swimmers. Doc enjoyed making house calls as he and his wife, Marjorie, hosted the team frequently.

“Here I was, I wasn’t even an IU swimmer, and I probably went to his house two or three times a summer,” said LeBeau, who grew up in Bloomington and attended Doc’s swim camp when he was 14. He began training with Doc and the IU team in the summer even after he started swimming at Clemson University in the mid-1980s. “If I wasn’t from Bloomington, I’d have swam for Doc,” he said.

Swimmers could count on Doc to break the monotony of practice with a well-placed story or joke. “Whenever he told you stories, it never sounded like he was bragging,” LeBeau said. “He would tell you an inside story about (All-Americans) Gary Hall or Mark Spitz that may have happened at NCAA (Championships). ‘When Mark won four individuals at NCAAs, he did this...’ and tell you something pretty funny about what happened.

“His stories were never about the accomplishments. Everyone knew the accomplishments. He would tell you about other swimmers and how they contributed.”

Doc didn’t just pay lip service to teamwork; it was as much a part of his program as championships. He gave everyone on his team a role and held him to it - not an easy task in a predominantly individual sport.

“He could get a team that really, really worked together under completely different circumstances from one year to the next,” Looze said. “He could take Mark Spitz and fit him in a team and that was pretty hard to do because Mark was a superstar. I’d ask him how he did that.”

Looze’s curiosity comes with being the head coach at Indiana. Learning about Doc and applying his work to the team today is a high priority for IU’s second-year coach.

Legacy Restored

In 33 years, Doc’s IU teams never placed lower than sixth in the Big Ten - and that was in 1958, his second season. When IU finished seventh in 2002 under Kris Kirchner, Looze was hired to rejuvenate the storied program.

Looze, who had been the head coach at Pacific, said it was “very humbling” and “scary,” when IU contacted him in 2002 about the position. And then he got to work.

“I just feel this sense of urgency, whether it’s something I feel from the alumni or the administration or just myself,” he said. “I’ve got to get this thing back before it’s too late. It was getting close to too late.”

In his first season Looze elevated the Hoosiers to a third-place Big Ten finish and their highest point total at the conference championships since 1991. The coach said he hopes his squad can be a Big Ten contender by 2005, two decades after Counsilman won the last of his 23 conference titles.

Swimming has changed since the peak of Doc’s career, when IU recorded 12 consecutive undefeated seasons and lost only twice between 1960 and 1978. IU captured the national title from 1968 to 1973, and would likely have won several more in the early 1960s if IU had not been under NCAA sanctions resulting from misconduct in the football program.

Now limits on swimming scholarships, like in most college sports, have led to parity so that dynasties like Indiana swimming and UCLA basketball are likely over.

Looze, an admitted history buff, still thinks Doc’s program can work - and win. He has studied how Doc ran the program and hopes his rebuilding effort will reflect his legacy.

Looze and a colleague searched though old storage rooms to put the glory days on display, decorating his office with framed posters from several Olympiads and trophies from as far back as the 1930s. All-American certificates canvas the walls. There’s also a full-length poster of IU Hall of Famer Mark Spitz wearing his unprecedented seven gold medals from the 1972 Olympics. Looze even found a still-functioning stopwatch like the one Doc would have used in the 1960s. The message is clear: Doc is still an integral part of Indiana swimming.

“This is where I meet with most of my major recruits and also alumni, so (this office), the whole building really, needs to reflect that legacy,” Looze said. “You see the banners out there but there’s so much more.”

What Would Doc Do?

Looze admits much of what he has learned about Doc has come in the last two weeks since his passing. He wishes he could have learned more but the Parkinson’s disease confined Doc to his Bloomington home most of the last five years.

“I never got to talk to Doc and that is my biggest regret in coming to Indiana,” Looze said. “I would have loved to sit in the office with him and shoot the swimming breeze, but that wasn’t possible.

“It would have been great to have him as a mentor and say, ‘Doc, these are my plans for the season, what do you think?’ or ‘I’ve got this kid that I think can do this but how do I tap into him?’”

Doc’s presence is still everywhere in Bloomington. IU opened the Counsilman-Bilingsley Aquatic Center in 1996 and there’s a sculpture of him in the lobby.

IU professor Joel Stager runs the Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming to conduct the research that Doc once pioneered. Looze has an endowment fund for the swim program to be named after Doc and Marjorie already in the works.

LeBeau is now head coach of Bloomington Swim Club, an age group swim team that he has patterned after Doc’s coaching style. Sometimes LeBeau even uses Doc’s favorite sets.

But how do you best honor the all-time greats? Looze said all it takes is asking one question: “Why?”

“He constantly questioned ‘why’ on everything, and challenged other coaches to do the same,” he said. “Not only did he do a lot of research himself but he forced his rivals to do it to keep up with him. I think his greatest contribution was not only forcing the level of competition to a high, but also the level of research.”

What would Doc have done? Did he have any stories left to tell?

These are the questions we are left to explore for ourselves - just how Doc would like it.