TEN QUESTIONS WITH...

Having been at the helm of the UB swim program for 14 years, talk about the changes you have seen since the switch to the Division I level and into the Mid-American Conference.
When I came to UB, I was actually the first coach hired for the upgrade to the Division I level. I was previously the Assistant Swimming Coach at the University of Kansas. The program at Kansas was a perennial Top 20 program in the nation, so my experience at that level was a plus. What is really great about this whole experience is that with all the changes going on throughout that upgrade, many of us had the freedom to be the architects of our programs. You could really put your stamp on a program, because we were all starting from the same place. For a young head coach at the time, it was a chance to plant your own seeds and develop you own traditions. There has always been a lot of energy at Alumni Arena throughout this whole process. I have probably coached swimming in more Division I conferences than any other swimming coach in the country. Change has always been part of the landscape here at UB athletics.

However, I am really glad we landed in a “name brand” conference like the MAC. It has given all the teams here at UB a uniform target to aspire toward. But for us in particular, it has really demonstrated the elite level of swimming that has been going on here for the last 10 years. Since we have joined the MAC, our swimmers have broken four school records. When those records were broken, the time that swimmer performed was good for first or second place at the conference meet. Last year, Jason McLachlan broke our oldest school record in the 500 freestyle. That record was established in 1991. He finished in second place at the MAC Championships in that event. So if you want to see what it takes to compete at the top of the Mid-American conference in any event, all you have to do is look at our school record board. The level of performances prior to our move to the MAC really provides a great source of pride, because we have had numerous swimmers over the years that could have competed very evenly in this conference. For our current team members it provides a very visible target to aspire.

Twice in the past eight years, your teams have finished with the top grade point average at the Division I level. How much does that mean to you, and what do you do in order to have your teams achieve so much academic success?
As we upgraded to the Division I level, one of our goals as a program was to be a constant presence at the national level. To me, that’s what Division I athletics is all about. When I was in graduate school, I did a paper on the academic standing of swimming programs, and their finish in the conference standings athletically for all the top Division I conferences. In all cases, the team that had the most All-Academic team members was also first or second in the end of the season team standings. It was evident to me that good academics and athletics could go hand in hand. So from the beginning, we emphasized that if we really wanted to be a good swimming program, part of the ingredients for that success included performing in an elite way in the classroom. Everyone really took our grade point average very seriously, as it went higher and higher each semester. One of the really neat things about those academic accomplishments was that there was only one athlete that was a member of both of those teams that attained the best grade point average. So we accomplished that feat with two distinctly different populations of student-athletes.

But that philosophy and goal would have been really hard to attain without the great leadership and direction that comes from Dr. Steve Wallace and the Office of Academic Support. I believe that one of the strengths aside from all the support programs that Dr. Wallace has developed since I have come to UB, is his ability to identify and mold a great staff of academic coordinators. We have, over my career here at UB, really had some dedicated people work with all of our athletes, in a real air of teamwork. It’s contribution to our program and the Division of Athletics cannot be overstated.

In October, you were selected as one of the Chancellor Award Winners for Excellence in Professional Service. You were the first coach in New York State system to ever win such an award. What are your thoughts on being recognized for such a prestigious award?
When I first came to UB, there was a lot of debate about whether Division I athletics was really going to be a benefit to our institution. I really viewed this accomplishment as a team win for our swimming program and the Division of Athletics. Because I am the coach of the program, I was recognized individually, but anytime a program succeeds, it is really a team effort. To be recognized with all of these brilliant and talented people I hope demonstrated that even if you pick athletics as a profession, and coach at a university, that hopefully the same basic characteristics that make a great professor are the same in my profession, only in an athletic application. There are some really talented and creative people here in the Division of Athletics, and many have really contributed in a positive way to increasing the visibility of our university. I personally have been fortunate to work with some really fine athletes that have really taken their athletics and academics seriously. We have enjoyed a lot of success over the years, and with all the changes that our department has gone through, sometimes their contributions or accomplishments have been a little overshadowed. So for all of those athletes that have been here with me for the last 14 seasons, I was pleased that this award highlighted many of the accomplishments that were achieved while they attended UB.

It is well known that you have teamed up with UB professor Dr. David Pendergast to use cutting edge science to train your athletes. Give us an overview of what methods you use, and any projects you are currently working on.
Our association with Dr. Pendergast has become one of the most rewarding and enlightening aspects of our program. Over 20 years ago, Dr. Pendergast did some of the best research on how swimmers should be trained in order to achieve optimal performance results. Many of the terms and methods Dr. Pendergast published about 20 years ago, have now become part of the mainstream language in our sport.

Our basic philosophy is that every athlete is different, so in order to optimize each team member an individualized training program needs to be developed. It takes a lot of time in order to accomplish this, but in the end, the results in improvement have been worth all the work. Our athletes go through a series of physiological and biomechanical tests that give us an overview of our athlete’s strengths and especially their weaknesses. Then a training model based on the measurements was developed. We have even developed two training devices that we use regularly in practice everyday, that the university has patented.

One of the current projects we are currently working on is the different configurations that swimming suits have undergone. We were one of the first places in the world to measure the differences in drag in the new swimming suits that were so controversial at the last Olympics. Before the 1996 Olympic Games, one of the major suit manufactures came to UB with one of the members of that Olympic team to do some preliminary testing. Coming up this March 11th through the 13th, Olympic medallist and World Champion Martina Marakova will be coming here to get tested using methodology that Dr. Pendergast has developed. I believe these kinds of experiences really go beyond the average Division I athletic swimming program. It gives our athletes an edge, because they get to meet, associate, and understand that this level of swimmer is really just like them, and if they work hard enough, they to can compete at that level.

At Clarion University, you were a Division II All-American in the 50 and 100 freestyle events. Are those the events that are easiest for you to coach, or are all events similar from a coaching standpoint?
In my coaching career, I have never really had one event or distance that I like coaching more than another. Here at UB, we have really had a uniform rate of improvement in all the different strokes and distances. It’s a statistic that Dr. Pendergast and I really watch very closely. In swimming, it is best to define that what you're doing with your athletes really is working. In swimming, the ultimate goal is to perform a lifetime best time. Every stroke and distance is really different to coach and define. Even the personalities of the swimmers that compete in different events can be quite different. I think being able to take all those differences and achieve consistent longitudinal performance improvements is what I have enjoyed the most. We have, over the years, been known as a program that has had a lot of elite swimmers in many different events. And many of our swimmers have, after being here a while, have become quite versatile and have been able to expand the events they can compete in at a high level.

Your website, http://ub-swimming.buffalo.edu, contains a number of features. Talk about the process of keeping the site up-to-date and how much work goes into it.
The website really began for us six years ago, as a way to get the word out about our program. Websites were really just beginning, and most universities didn’t have them. We had one of the first websites at UB when it first went up. People in the academic computing services at the time were really very helpful in whole process. When the first web browsers first came out, I found out how to get on the internet, and like everyone, started to check out this new form of communication. It looked like a great way to showcase a program. So I went out with my video camera and took shots all over campus, and of our facilities, digitized them and learned how to put them into a web document. One of the first features of the site was what I called the “Virtual Campus Tour”. It is still on our site today.

The other feature that received the most interest then, and is still one of the highest in terms of hits, is our team roster. We have a nice digital picture of each team member, a short bio on where they are from, their major in school, and their significant accomplishments while here at UB. But one of the most important features in this section is right under the athletes picture is a table that shows their best time in high school, and their best UB time. Because we have such a high rate of time improvement with our athletes, it was a way to highlight one of the strengths of our program. I don’t know of any swimming website on the net right now that displays that type of information about their individual team members.

I then asked the computing services if they could develop a way that I could tell who was hitting our site, and what they were looking at the most. Since everything was so new, it was hard to really know what most people would really be interested in learning about. To my surprise, even in those early days, we were getting a lot of hits to our site. And shortly after that I started to receive e-mails from potential student-athletes asking about our program. At that time, we historically had most of our team members from New York State. After the first year of our website, we had a swimmers from Denver, (Colorado), Gainesville (Georgia), and our first international swimmer from Edmonton (Alberta, Canada). It was clear, right from the beginning, that the web was really going to assist us in getting increased exposure for our program. From there, various web sites have emerged that rate or rank swimming web sites. Our site was featured and remains linked today on one of the most popular swimming websites called “The 50 Best Swimming Web Sites” on the internet.

It does take quite a bit of work to keep everything up to date, especially when we are swimming meets almost every weekend. I spend many bus rides back from a meet updating times and doing write-ups about the previous meets results. I have really gotten some positive feedback from our alumni, especially the ones that have swam for me. I have continued to put a lot of energy into our site because I feel it’s still the best way to promote our program and university.

Looking at your roster, your athletes hail from a number of places. There are swimmers from not only Massachusetts to Texas, but also from other countries such as Israel and Turkey. What enables your team to bring in talent from across the globe?
There are various ways a coach or a potential swimmer finds out about a program, and all are looking for something in particular. Today, many athletes can better find out about a program because there are so many sources of information both athletically and academically about a school. Obviously everyone puts different emphasis on what they believe is important when picking a school. I believe what has really set us apart from most Division I programs, is that we really have a good track record with making our athletes better, and getting many of them to the elite level in swimming. We have also had just as good of a record of success with our athletes academically over the years. Those traditions take time to establish, and we have really been able to sustain those kinds of results for a very long time. I really believe that we are just beginning to realize the benefits of all the hard work that has been put in over the past 14 seasons. In conjunction with the success we have had, the association with Dr. David Pendergast from the Department of Biophysics and Physiology has definitely increased our international exposure. Dr. Pendergast and I have published many peer-reviewed papers on the training we incorporate here with our swimmers. We have also had Olympic team members, and national champions come here to UB to be tested and given training advice. Some of the articles we have published are distributed by the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and are read by coaches all over our country and the world. So many coaches are aware of what is going on here with our program. Three years ago, I was invited to speak at the World Swimming Symposium in Jyvaskyla, Finland. The top people in swimming from all over the world attend this symposium. Many of those international contacts have led to interest from swimmers from all over the world. But when swimmers come to visit us, I believe it is our team chemistry that really attracts them to us. Over the years, we have had some great team chemistry between the athletes and coaches. We are all really committed to hard work. I can tell you I have had some ferocious workers in my program, and many of them were very internally motivated. It didn’t take much encouragement from me to get them going; they really possessed it on their own. When you put that kind of chemistry together, it really pulls a program up very quickly.

UB swam at the East Coast Athletic Conference Championships last week, and will be at the MAC Championships, this week. How does the team look going into the MAC meet?
Last week, the team really performed very well, and we were able to establish 13 lifetime best times at that meet. We use that meet as a tune-up for the upcoming MAC Championships. The level of both of these championships is really pretty similar. Because most of our swimmers now have some good performances under their belt, it really takes the pre-meet anxiety away that is usually associated with going into such a big meet. Now we head to the MAC Championships with confidence, to really dig in harder. Many of our swimmers have put themselves in a position to score well at the MAC meet with just a little more improvement. We have used this setup for the last three seasons, with really good results. It also gives me a good chance to help them fine-tune the little things in a big meet situation. We videotaped every race at the ECAC’s so we could really pick out all the little things that crop up in a race. Many races in swimming are won and lost by hundredths of a second, so those little things at this time of the season can really be helpful to optimizing their performances. I have always had a lot of confidence in our swimmers and divers at these high level meets, so we are all excited to get to Athens, Ohio. The meet starts this Thursday and goes through Saturday. Results will be posted on the UB Athletics web site everyday.

In December, Tony Lizauckas earned honors as MAC Men's Swimmer of the week. Certainly individual awards are important, but how much focus do you put on them?
Individual honors achieved by our swimmers and divers are always very important. Most of these types of awards are as a result of good performance. In our program, we are squarely focused and put most of our emphasis on performance, and constant improvement. In swimming, winning isn’t always the supreme measure of success. You can win a race or even a meet, but not post good times. Tony had a lifetime best time to be selected Mid-American Swimmer of the Week. What makes Tony’s achievement significant for our program is that he swims backstroke, and over the years, we have established a rich tradition in the backstroke events. Many of our top backstroke performers have reached the national level, have won conference titles and held conference records for this stroke.

-The '10 Questions with…' feature is compiled by Geoff Nason.