Coaching Commitment
 | | Dennis Dale, center. Photograph courtesy of University Athletics. |
By Chris Coughlan Smith
Dennis Dale (B.S. ’68, B.S. ’73) can hardly contain his smile. It’s a Wednesday in early November, the toughest day of the week for swimmers on the University of Minnesota men’s swimming and diving team, and Dale likes what he sees. In his 20th year as the head coach, Dale has amassed a collection of workouts to test his team. On this particular day, he’s pulled out a doozy for his short-distance swimmers: nearly an hour of warming up at various distances, paces, and strokes, followed by six all-out 100-yard swims, one every eight minutes.
And they’re swimming under racing conditions: with heats divided by strokes and ability, a starting gun, automatic timing, instant results, and, for extra motivation, a printout of the results from the same workout in November 2002, the last time Dale put the team through this particular trial. “They hate this workout,” he had said as the swimmers warmed up. “They’re either getting psyched up or considering their doom.”
But as the workout progresses, the Gopher swimmers respond. Terry Silkaitis, a senior from Skokie, Illinois, is beating his times from the 2002 workout; three months later, in spring 2003, he was named Big Ten Swimmer of the Year. Breaststroker Sean Kelly, a sophomore from Omaha, Nebraska, built like a football linebacker, is not only beating his times from two years earlier, he is bulling past the times put up by school record holders Jeff Hackler (B.S. ’03) and Mike Brown, who turned pro and made the 2004 Olympic final in the 200 breaststroke. Backstroker Adam Mitchell, a junior from Des Moines, Iowa, is showing better form than last year’s all-American season. In the adjacent pool, senior captain Justin Mortimer of Milton, Massachusetts, who won four events at the 2004 summer nationals, is tearing up the distance swimmers’ workout.
But it isn’t just the top swimmers showing their stuff. Up and down Minnesota’s broad lineup, swimmers are excelling. In the middle of the workout, a timer reports that a swimmer has just beaten his best time for the entire season. Dale simply nods.
After starting each heat of four or five swimmers, Dale silently stalks up and down the side of the pool, his head cocked, staring intently at each lane and each turn. After each heat, as swimmers drag themselves out of the pool and into the adjacent diving well for slow recovery swims, Dale heaps praise on the best times and encouragement on the slower swimmers. He offers individual tips on head position, a slight kick imperfection, or something that went amiss on a turn costing a few hundredths of a second.
Then it’s back to start the next group, those swimmers already in the pool or on the blocks, ready to give it their all despite their growing weariness. As the rounds progress, swimmers pull themselves from the pool more slowly, some even lie on the pool deck, gasping for a few moments before beginning their recovery swims. But none give up. Everyone finishes the workout; almost everyone has beaten his time from 2002 or has exceeded Dale’s expectations. “I’m very pleased,” Dale says, finally breaking into a smile. “Oh, yes. This was a good workout.”
This is no small praise from Dale. Described by his swimmers and his colleagues as the most competitive person they’ve ever met, Dale has set a very high standard. He has quietly built a national swimming power at Minnesota, a program that has won five of the last nine Big Ten titles and finished in the NCAA top 10 the past five years. And this, he says, may be his best team yet, just in time to host the Big Ten and NCAA meets in February and March.
What might be most impressive is that the Minneapolis native—who grew up swimming for a local club, coached at area high schools, and has lived outside the Twin Cities only after being drafted into the Army in the late 1960s—has done it at Minnesota. No other school outside the southwestern or southeastern United States can boast so many high NCAA finishes. Minnesota does not typically get the top-ranked recruits, but, as a keen technician and with short but intense workouts, Dale gets the most out of every swimmer in his program. “We don’t believe in wasting an athlete’s time,” he says of his coaching philosophy. “They have a lot of priorities in college and a lot of things that take their time and energy. What we do is get the most out of the time we ask them to give us.”
Dale cites Silkaitis as a prime example of his “do more in less time” philosophy. “Terry Silkaitis swims nine times a week. Swimmers Terry is racing against practice 12 times a week, but I know we can get as much out of our nine as they do in their 12,” Dale says. “We don’t think a diet of 100,000 yards a week is going to help Terry Silkaitis be any better at what he does best. Here he swims 50,000 or 60,000 yards a week and gets just as much improvement as being somewhere where he’d be trained almost twice as far.”
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Talking in his chaotically cluttered office in the University Aquatic Center, the 59-year-old Dale comes across as mild-mannered and affable, almost unsure of himself, starting sentences three or four times rapid-fire before finding his thread and running with it. But on the pool deck his intensity emerges. His voice grows loud, never faltering as he describes a workout, offers praise or correction, or exhorts his team. His concentration is unbreakable as he watches his charges in the water. Just as he asks their commitment to intense workouts, so he returns it in his own total commitment to the team.
Trust and rapport grows up between the swimmers and Dale, says Kelly Kremer, formerly the associate head coach for the men’s team who was hired last year as co–head coach of the women’s team. “One thing I’ve learned from Dennis, and I’ll take this with me wherever I go, is that every swimmer on the team feels like they have a say in that team,” Kremer says. “That’s part of the art of coaching and Dennis does that better than anybody I’ve met. From recruiting to winning a Big Ten title to becoming a top-10 team at NCAAs, you have the feeling that we all succeed together or we all fail together.”
Jean Freeman (B.A. ’71), the longtime women’s coach at Minnesota who retired last year, grew up swimming and coaching with Dale at the Ascension Swim Club in North Minneapolis. She was on the search committee that hired Dale in 1985 after he had coached and taught for 13 years at Burnsville High School. “I told the committee that if they wanted to have a winning program, I knew exactly who we ought to hire,” she recalls. “I knew with his dedication, energy level, and unbelievable eye for detail that he’d certainly turn the program around. He sets the expectation that you will do well and then has the ability to get it out of you.”
His swimmers agree emphatically. Dan Egeland (B.S. ’91) was the first of the 100 student athletes Dale has coached to first-team all-American honors at the University. “What it boils down to is that he understands everybody individually and what they need to motivate them,” Egeland says. “Dennis is not just a coach, he’s also a motivator, a disciplinarian, whatever he needs to be for each person.”
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When Dale joined Minnesota, he did so only after securing a one-year leave of absence from his teaching and coaching duties at Burnsville; if he didn’t like full-time college coaching, he planned to return to a job he found satisfying and fulfilling. But he wanted the chance to test himself at a higher level.
Dale had been a walk-on swimmer at the University in the ’60s who turned himself into an all-American in the backstroke. He wanted to see if he could do the same with others. Minnesota had not finished in the top half of the Big Ten in several years, and its last top-10 NCAA finish had been in Dale’s senior year, almost two decades earlier. “Dennis immediately set a strong tone as to what he expected and how he was going to run things,” recalls Egeland, who was a freshman in Dale’s first season. “People had to march to his drum.”
But things did not turn around immediately. The first year under Dale, the Gophers won only one of eight dual meets against Division I schools and finished ninth at the Big Ten meet. But swimmers were improving and enthusiasm was high. “I don’t know that I would have stayed if the team hadn’t had such a good experience,” Dale says. “At the Big Ten meet coaches were coming up and saying what a great job I was doing and all I could do was look up at the scoreboard and wonder what they were talking about.”
But by Dale’s fourth year, Minnesota had climbed to third in the Big Ten and finished 11th at the NCAA meet. In the 15 years since, his teams have not been worse than second in the Big Ten and have finished in the top 15 at the NCAA meet 13 times.
What amazes most observers is Dale’s ability to get improvement from so many swimmers. “Dennis identifies talent before it shows itself,” Egeland says. “Every year I’m amazed at the sophomores and juniors who emerge out of nowhere as the core of the team.”
For Dale, getting the most out of his swimmers is a necessity. “We know that being a northern school, we don’t generally have the pick of the litter,” he says. “We understand that warmer climates have more appeal to a 17-year-old. We can appeal to them by showing them that we don’t waste people’s talent. If they want their name on the scoreboard come NCAA championships, they need to do the kinds of things in practice that will get them there. We have a practice environment that can be fairly intense.”
Minnesota also features a large and deep squad that dominates with sheer numbers, winning many relays by having third- and fourth-leg swimmers better than any other team’s. In 2004, the Gophers won the Big Ten title without a single champion in any of the nonrelay events. In 2005, Indiana expects to use its dominance in the diving events, Minnesota’s weakest, to challenge the Gophers for the Big Ten team title. But Dale likes what he sees so far. “There are all kinds of people on this team who know they can step it up to make the Big Ten travel squad, or step up to being a Big Ten point scorer, or make a relay for NCAAs. This team has the potential to be our best ever,” he says. But can Indiana beat them in Minnesota’s own pool? Dale smiles confidently. “We’ll see.”
Until that meet at the end of February and the NCAA meet four weeks later, Dale will continue to extract improvement from his swimmers while also respecting their time, making them feel a part of the team, and giving them as much of himself as he can.
“What he’s instilled in the program is pretty unique and special in college swimming,” Egeland says. “He puts everything into it and it shows. When you swim for him, you know his commitment is 100 percent and you definitely want to give it back.”
Chris Coughlan-Smith (B.A. ’86) is senior editor of Minnesota.
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