Bob Seagraves is retiring. He has been swimming a long time. He’s been coaching for a long time, too. But his favorite swimming memory involves his daughter when she was five or six years old on a hot summer day.
“She was pretty fast,” he says. But “she dove in, swam to the other side, really slow. She was last by a mile. And my wife asked her, ‘Why’d you go so slow?’” He grins and says, “She goes, ‘It was so cool in there, I wanted to stay in as long as I could.’”
Bob Seagraves has been a swim coach for 32 years. For the last 18 years he has been coaching the varsity swim team at Georgetown, Texas. But at the end of this school year, he is retiring and moving to Louisiana.
Seagraves started early and was already swimming on a summer league swim team by the time he was seven, something he attributes to his parents, particularly his mom.
“I won [my first ribbon in] 1964. It was a fourth place ribbon. And just as encouragement, my aunt said, ‘Oh you swam like a frog!’ And I said, ‘That’s cool!’”
By the time he was 11, he was swimming on an club team – in another state. He lived in New Jersey. He swam in Delaware.
He would have swum on his high school team, but there wasn’t a swimming team. So he “represented” Woodstown High School by making the qualifying times and swimming in the regional meet.
And of course he swam in college.
“I was recruited by a bunch of different places, but I went to East Stroudsburg….” East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania is a public university located in Pennsylvania. “The coach called me up and said, ‘This is East Stroudsburg.’ [And] I said, ‘East what?’” He contemplates that a moment. “I made a big impression.”
“Our team was pretty close,” Seagraves says. Recalling swimming at a meet against another swimmer from La Salle University, he says, “Before I got on the block, he spit in my lane… [and] my team members saw it and they just went crazy but… I beat the guy and that was kinda cool.”
After graduating from East Stroudsburg in 1979, he soon found himself coaching. His first job as a coach was substituting at Fairview High School in Pennsylvania. He was an assistant coach for a year and then head coach for another year at Bethel High School in Virginia.
When he moved to Texas, he had to start teaching to be a coach, so he taught health or P.E. He was in Temple for a year, and then came to Georgetown High School, where he’s been for 18 years, outlasting two athletic directors and four principals that he can remember.
“My first couple years [at Georgetown] were pretty easy because the teams were really small,” Seagraves says. In fact, he says, “I think the first year we only had like four guys and six girls.” The year before there weren’t any guys on the team because they didn’t like the coach, he says. “They tried me out and they sorta kinda liked it I guess and from then, once the word got out, I think more and more people started joining the team, boys and girls.”
However, he didn’t find out until the first day of school that he had to learn how to drive a bus. “I got my bus driver’s license, and my first trip was to Dallas with a group of kids and that was the worst,” he says. “Kids were flying all over the place.”
Devonee McCary was a student at Georgetown High School and quit the high school swim team the year before Seagraves started coaching at Georgetown. She joined the team when Seagraves became the swim coach. “Not swimming for me was miserable but the program was so awful before he came,” she says. “He was always kind, professional and encouraging. He knew how to put the hammer down when we needed it!”
During his 18 years at Georgetown, the team grew. Until the Georgetown school district opened another high school, East View High School, in the fall of 2009 and started funneling students away from Georgetown High School, the team had nearly forty swimmers – nearly a 300 percent growth. Seagraves still coaches both high school swim teams, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
Practices originally were held in the mornings at Southwestern University’s indoor pool. Eventually, practices were moved to the Village Pool, a neighborhood pool. Seagraves didn’t think he would like coaching outdoors, but soon found that he liked the openness and the variety of the weather. “Sometimes it excited the kids just to swim in snow,” Seagraves says.
It was eleven years before his “first and only assistant” coach joined the team. “I think some of the parents said Coach Seagraves needs an assistant,” Seagraves says. Aaron Levine, a French teacher, had been at Georgetown High for a year when he started his position as an assistant coach in the fall of 2006. His impression on meeting Seagraves?
“He was a swimmer. That was what he loved to do,” Levine says. “I’ve learned a lot from him, working with him. I think the kids can see his enthusiasm for the sport. It’s a tough sport, but I think he keeps it lighthearted as well.”
The ratio of guys to girls roughly stayed the same, for the most part, with the girls outnumbering the guys. Until, “about four years ago, [when] the guys’ team actually outnumbered the girls’ for the first time. And that was kind of weird,” Seagraves says. “I liked it better when there was more girls than guys because the girls were more behaved.”
Sophia Spilotro has swum with Seagraves since 2011. “I have always admired Coach Seagraves’ coaching,” she says, “because he’s not like other coaches… He incorporates encouraging quotes and messages through speech and on the bottom of each workout sheet that is on the pool deck every morning.”
Seagraves says, “Each team, each year was different. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. And sometimes you had to keep a better eye on some of the kids.”
Ken Doocy has had two kids swim for Seagraves. His daughter loved Seagraves because he understood where she was competitively in swimming and encouraged her. “To this day she doesn’t mention his name without a smile on her face,” he says. Speaking of his son’s experience, Doocy says, “I really think what my son got from Coach Seagraves [the] most was to enjoy yourself.”
Doocy says, “Coach was quick to laugh at himself,” which is good, he says, because he thinks it is important to have a light-hearted approach “when you are working at such a difficult sport for such long periods of time… I think all of his swimmers have a different relationship with him because he relates to them at the level that they are participating.”
Seagraves says the swimmers he enjoyed the most were the ones that were hard-workers and were there everyday. “But there’s some I don’t know why they even swam because they hated it, everyday. And they’re the ones I just couldn’t understand… I think that those people really just enjoyed being part of a group. And it was a good group to be a part of.”
“My philosophy as a coach is just to make them the best they can with what they have and enjoy what they’re doing. And I think if they enjoy what they’re doing, most of the time they can achieve a lot more,” Seagraves says. “But I also want them to work hard towards their goals because it will just mean so much more to them. And it’ll mean a lot more to me too.”
He was pretty sure that he would retire this year. “I was eighty-five percent sure that I was going to retire this year… But my wife, when she accepted the position at Louisiana, just made it a hundred percent that I was going to retire.”
Levine thinks Seagraves’ retirement is “well-earned.” “I think he’s ready for it,” he says. “It’s been a lot of fun... He’s a funny guy.”
Seagraves says that he doesn’t know what he is going to do yet after he retires. “But I have to do something… or my wife will kick me out,” he says, laughing.
He’s proud of being able to stick with the team for 18 years and adapt to “the hard times and the good times… And getting to know the kids.”