Coach QUick and AU swimming

AU won another men's swimming championship. Coach Quick who returned to AU after David Marsh left had 12 women's championships on his resume. This is his first men's title. Also breaks a tie with David for the number of swimming national championships. Also first coach to win a NC at three schools: Auburn, Texas, Stanford.

Coach has an inoperable brain tumor and is in a lot of pain. Team wore Time to Represent Richard Quick shirts when receiving their trophy.

War Eagle Coach and God Bless

 

Individual sports like swimmimg do become team ones sometimes; especially in situations like that. Sure looked like all the guys were pulling together so they individually didn't let the team or the coach down.

Every individual event essentially becomes just like one leg of a long relay or like a baseball team at bat... each athlete doing his part individually, yet together as a team.

Congrats AU for what you did for your coach !!

http://blog.al.com/goldmine/2009/03/auburn_won_its_eighth_ncaa.html

 

I guess we all knew it was a matter of time. I'm thrilled that the Auburn team was able to win it all to honor Coach Quick and they were able to share the moment together back in March. My thoughts and best wishes go out to Coach Quick's family and to Auburn's swim team.

Auburn Swimming Coach Richard Quick Passes Away

 

The moment when Auburn won their championship for their coaches last hurrah stands out, to me, as a moment like Lou Gherig's farewell speech at Yankee stadium.

When I was eight yrs old I read a book one summer about Lou Gherig. When I got to that part I got so emotional that I still remember it today.

It turns out that Gherig was a dugout prankster. I remember also that, when the Yanks were in a real batting slump, He brought a jar of eels that his mother had pickled and made everyone eat them to break the slump.

I hope the Auburn team has memories like that to go with all the other ones.

 

Justice: Quick left lasting impression in and out of pool | Sports | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Commentary by Richard Justice - Houston Chronicle
June 14, 2009
Quick left lasting impression in and out of pool

Richard Quick’s words ring in their ears four decades later, and perhaps that’s the lasting tribute to this remarkable man.
He lost a brief, hellish fight to brain cancer Wednesday at age 66. He’ll be remembered as one of the great swimming coaches ever because it’s simpler to add up the numbers and evaluate people that way.
Yet numbers don’t begin to tell how many people Quick touched, or how deeply he touched them.
“I carry him in my life every day,” said Jennifer Webb, who swam for Quick at both Dad’s Club in the 1960s and at SMU in the ’70s. “He was the male role model for my life, for helping me find a wonderful husband.”
Quick was 21 years old when he pulled a battered Volvo into the parking lot at the Dad’s Club in 1965, beginning a career that would take him to the top of his profession.
He won 13 national championships at Texas, Stanford and Auburn and six consecutive state championships at Memorial High School. He led the U.S. Olympic team three times and was an assistant three other times.
One of his swimmers — Jenny Thompson — won eight gold medals. He also coached Dara Torres, Janet Evans and Rowdy Gaines.
Those elite athletes give his career substance, but Quick did great things with thousands of others who couldn’t begin to dream of the Olympics. They, too, tell stories of the values he instilled and the lessons he taught.
In the final days of his life, he heard from hundreds who thanked him for some small act of kindness or for some accomplishment that seems magical even now. More than 59,000 tributes have been posted on a Web site dedicated to his life.
Quick had more energy and more passion for his job than 10 other men. He would show up for a 5 a.m. workout singing country songs and trying to convince every kid that this day was the most important of their life.
At one meet, he celebrated each good race by loudly singing “Hello Mary Lou.”
A shoo-in for shoe job

Quick ran up and down pool decks around the world, and to this day, his swimmers can still hear that voice and feel that passion. They see him chewing on those tattered heat sheets and twirling that stopwatch, and mainly they see him waiting there at the end of the pool with a hug and a smile.
Only the really great coaches, the ones who are as motivated by practice as the big game, the ones who care as much about the kids at the bottom of their roster as those at the top, can touch kids the way Quick did.
Not just swimmers, either. When he interviewed for the Dad’s Club job, the guy who ran the Florsheim shoe store in downtown Houston was so impressed that he offered him a job selling shoes.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t know if you’re going to get this coaching job or not, but you can always come to work for me.”
Webb laughed Saturday morning when she remembered how he helped her become one of the world’s great distance freestylers.
“I started to cry when he told me he wanted me in distance events,” she said.
Three years later, Webb was an 800 free finalist at the Olympic trials.
“He made you believe you could do anything,” she said. “That’s part of his legacy.”
Twin s Brent and Kent Barker passed a cell phone back and forth Saturday morning as they remembered their coach.
“A lot of us didn’t care about medals and ribbons,” Brent said. “We swam to please him. I think of him every day.”
‘Loved the underdog’

A few weeks ago, Brent Barker, now with Anadarko, sat down and wrote Quick.
“He instilled a competitive spirit in my body,” he said. “He’d drive the bus to meets, and if we didn’t do well, there wouldn’t be a word said on the bus. When we got home, he’d stand on the bottom steps, and you had to make eye contact with him as you were getting off.
“He had some great swimmers, but he was equally excited by the guy that had to give it everything just to, say, qualify for consolation finals. Richard loved the underdog. He’d organize these water-polo games, and he’d jump in there with us. He was always on the short-handed team.”
Kent Barker spoke to Quick 10 days before he died.
“I told him he’d been like an older brother to me,” he said. “He laughed and said no one had said that.”
There was the time Quick decided to start a weight-lifting program for Dad’s Club swimmers. He didn’t have the money to buy real weight-lifting equipment, so the swimmers sawed up some rusted pipes and filled coffee cans with concrete.
A great motivator

He once promised to swim a 3,000-yard butterfly — a nearly unthinkable accomplishment — if his swimmers raised a certain amount of money.
They did, and he did.
Brent Barker visited one of Quick’s Stanford swim camps a few years ago and saw the same passion he’d seen all those years earlier in Houston.
“He was down on the cement showing these kids how to do a backstroke flip-turn,” he said.
Leilani Hurles also swam at Dad’s Club for Quick. She was a Texas breaststroke champion when Quick told her she was good enough to go to nationals.
“I did it, and to this day, I don’t know how,” she said. “It was all that man. He could get that little extra you didn’t know you had. He’d give pep talks to 100 people, and you were convinced he was talking to you. I’m sure the other 99 people felt the same way.”
Brent Barker remembered the time he and his brother went into Quick’s office at Dad’s Club to tell him they were going to take a summer off and work as lifeguards.
“When we left his office, we were ready to do two-a-days for the rest of our lives,” Brent said. “He kept saying, ‘You owe it to yourself.’ ”
Deeply touched by coach

Brent paused and laughed.
“I could talk about him all day,” he said. “He had a profound influence. I always think I can do better today than I did yesterday, and that’s a lesson from Richard. But the best thing about him was his heart and spirit.”
Brent and Kent kept coming up with things they wanted to say. They want me to understand how important Richard Quick was in the hearts and minds of so many.
“One day, he asked the two of us to help clean up the pool after a meet,” Kent said. “We didn’t say a word. We would have cleaned up the sewers of Paris for that man.”
[email protected]

 

SZVETITZ COLUMN: Quick left behind legacy of love, leadership to all who knew him | Opelika-Auburn News



Mike Szvetitz
A View From The Lazy Boy
Published: June 20, 2009
Rowdy Gaines doesn’t have any of the three gold medals he won during the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
He gave them all away.
One to his mom, one to his dad and one to Richard Quick.
That’s how much the late Auburn University swimming coach meant to Gaines — and how much Quick still means more than a week after his death.
“I would not have been in the Olympic arena without his love and support,” Gaines said of Quick, who coached the Olympian at Auburn from 1978-81 and then three more years leading up to the ’84 Olympics. “There’s no way I could be the man I am today without Richard.”
Former Auburn head swimming coach David Marsh feels the same way. So does current head coach Brett Hawke. As does AU athletic director Jay Jacobs, and no doubt the countless athletes, coaches, friends and family Quick touched during his 66 years on this earth.
“He’s the most influential man in my life,” Marsh said. “Period.”
“He is the finest person I’ve ever known,” Jacobs said.
“He was everything to me,” said Gaines.
Quick died June 10, less than six months after he was diagnosed with an inoperable cancerous brain tumor. He was buried Friday in Austin, Texas. More than 40 athletes, coaches and administrators from Auburn attended Quick’s funeral, which was followed by a celebration of life.
He will be missed.
But never forgotten. Just ask anyone who knew him, talked to him, coached with him or swam for him.
Richard Quick was everything to a lot of people, but especially his family — June, his wife; his children, Michael, Kathy, Tiffany and Benjamin; and his grandchildren, Blake and Emily — whom he loved more than any of the 13 NCAA Championships he accumulated over his outstanding collegiate coaching career or any other accolade, award or honor on his mantle. Which, by the way, is bigger than Tiger Woods’.
And it’s that love — not the accomplishments — that will be missed and remembered most.
Sure, Quick has the most national championships of any collegiate swimming coach, ever, which sets him apart from the start. But it’s the way he lived his life — how he carried himself and treated others around him — that defines Richard Quick.
“If you look at what success is in the secular world of college athletics, there’s nobody in the swimming world more successful,” Jacobs said. “In order to achieve that, you’ve got to be an outstanding person. One with unquestionable character and integrity and ethics and hard work and positive attitude. He had all those things.
“It’s not a coincidence he was so successful.”
And that’s what Hawke says is the essence of who Richard Quick was.
“People recognize Richard as a great coach and a great person,” said Hawke, the man who filled in as Auburn’s co-head coach when Quick was diagnosed with the brain tumor and led the men to their eighth NCAA title this past March. “But he wasn’t a great person because he was a great coach. He was a great coach because he was a great person. The person made the coach.
“He was a great man, and that came first before coaching.”
But just to put in perspective how good Quick was during his 44 years on the pool deck, read on:
* Quick, who was first at Auburn as head coach from 1978-82, took over the Tiger program for a second time after the 2007 season, two years later he won his 13th NCAA title.
* He won seven NCAA titles at Stanford, including five in a row, then followed that with five at Texas as the head of the women’s swimming programs.
* Six times he was named the NCAA Coach of the Year, including this past season.
* He was head coach of the United States team at the 1988, 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games, and also served as an assistant at the 1984, 1992 and 2004 Olympics.
* He’s also a member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame.
But according to the people who knew him the best, Quick’s list of accomplishments away from the pool is even more impressive. He was better at life, if that’s possible.
‘A better place’
“Richard made the world a better place every day,” said Marsh, who was a part of Quick’s first recruiting class at Auburn University in 1978. “There wasn’t a day that went by where people around him weren’t better, lifted up and challenged. I’ve never met a man like him, and probably never will.”
In or out of the pool, Quick made everyone better, Hawke said. A better swimmer, a better coach, a better person. Especially a better person.
“Richard had an ability to make people believe in the impossible,” Hawke said. “If you heard it from someone else, you’d laugh at them. But if you heard it from Richard, you’d sit and listen and actually believe.
“He would see things and believe in things before anyone else would see or believe in them.”
Quick believed as deep as anyone could, said both Jacobs and Marsh.
His belief in his swimmers is what made them better. His belief in his coaches is what propelled their careers. His belief in God is what he leaned on throughout his life, and even more so when he found out about the cancer that eventually took his life.
“The one thing he always stood on was his Christian foundation,” Jacobs said. “I called him on Dec. 26, a few days after he found out (about the brain tumor) and I asked him how he was doing. He said ‘I’m doing great. My salvation is secure.’
“He said, ‘I don’t know how people can go through anything like this or even every day without knowing their salvation is secure.’
“He said ‘We’re going to fight through this, but I’m in God’s hands.’”
Belief was the cornerstone of Quick’s life. His foundation as a Christian led him as a man, a husband, a father, a grandfather and a coach.
And it inspired others.
“When I swam under him, I wanted to be like him,” Marsh said. “As a coach, I wanted to coach like Richard. And now, when we had conversations about his Christian walk in his older years, I want to have the same Christian walk as he did.
“I want to model everything in my life after Richard.”
An ‘unbelievable’ legacy
Those close to him drew more than just spiritual strength from Quick. They also drank from the fountain of knowledge, experience and wisdom that seemed to pour out of him effortlessly.
From advising Marsh on a career choice that took him away from Auburn, where he’d been the head coach for 16 years and won 12 of his own NCAA titles, to giving Hawke the confidence to take the program’s current reigns, to encouraging his athletic director even though Quick was the one battling for his life, to being the ear and shoulder Gaines consistently went back to throughout his entire storybook career, Quick was there.
Always there.
Still there.
“When he called me on Dec. 22, it took him just a minute to tell me he had an inoperable brain tumor, then he went on to tell me how much he appreciated me and lift me up,” Jacobs said. “He takes one minute to convey to me that he’s got this ‘little’ thing called an inoperable brain tumor and then takes five minutes to lift me up and encourage me.
“It was unbelievable.”
That’s just Richard, Gaines said.
“He was and continues to be the most influential person in my life,” said Gaines. “He was my coach, a second father to me and he was my friend. I don’t know how much closer you can get than those three when you are an athlete and you think about the things you want to have when someone influences you.”
And so he lives on.
“His inspiration is his legacy. His example is his legacy,” Jacobs said. “Nothing that he has won — no trophies on the mantle. It’s just him. The way he impacted my life, his coaches, his prior coaches and athletes, his grandchildren, his children. That’s his legacy, the impact he had on them.
“Not only his words of encouragement, but the way he lived out his own life. You get those two things to match up, you can leave a legacy. And that’s what he did.”
Every day.
“There’s a saying, ‘A baby comes into the world crying and the world rejoices. And the way you want to go out is you rejoicing and the world crying.’ That’s the way Richard Quick went out,” Jacobs said.
“He was rejoicing. And we’re all here.”
Better because of Richard Quick.

 

A few folks on here know that I was a competive swimmer in high school. I competed at a fairly high level, and attended several of Coach Quick's swim camps. His camps had people from every skill level from Olympic hopefuls all the way down to kids who were a long shot to qualify for a high school state meet.

I was well below the Olympic class folks, but I swam in the big regional meets and even qualified for Jr. Nationals a few times.

Coach Quick treated everyone in the pool the same. He gave as much attention to the guy who couldn't do a flip turn as he did to the guy who was trying to beat an American Record.