Athletic Success isn’t Defined by a Division
February 26th, 2009 - byYesterday’s New York Times profiled Kenyon swim coach Jim Steen. Steen is known throughout college athletics as one of the most succesful coaches regardless of division level. His team’s have won 29 consecutive national men’s team championships and 22 women’s championships over his 33 year career at Kenyon. In fact, Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel recently sought out Jim for coaching advice. Coach Steen’s value’s and philosophy span all levels of competition.
Steen challenges his swimmers to reshape their contours of success. In one mass e-mail message to them, he wrote, 
“Find a place within yourself where success and failure don’t matter, a place where you can engage in battle without compromise.”
Steen preaches the art of adaptation, of reinventing yourself as circumstances dictate. One of his best breaststrokers, Tracy Menzel, a senior, came to Kenyon as a freestyle sprinter.
Her best events were the 50 and 100 freestyles, but she hit a plateau as a freshman and declined. At Steen’s suggestion, she started training in the breaststroke. In four years, she has lowered her time in the 100 by more than six seconds. As a sophomore, she won the national title.
Menzel said, “I wonder what would have happened if I had been at another school and hadn’t had a coach who said, ‘Let’s do something completely different than what we recruited you for.’ ”
Asked which of Steen’s simple truths she has most tightly embraced, Menzel did not hesitate. “The one that’s really stuck with me,” she said, is, “you can approach anything two ways: under a threat or for the challenge.”
The best swimmers at Kenyon would be challenged to make the traveling squads for the top Division I programs, though not for lack of training. They spend as much time working out as their counterparts at powerhouses like Michigan or Stanford. The difference is they are swimming for personal satisfaction and not for fear of losing scholarships.
I talk to a lot of athletes that aspire to play collegiate athletics. Unfortunately, some tell me that if they can’t play at the Division I level they are no longer interested in pursuing their sport. The Kenyon swim program is an example of why that sentiment may be incorrect.
