Q & A with Roy Coates
March 25, 2003
  Head Coach Roy Coates |
 Roy Coates was the America East Coach of the Year in 2003 after leading the Huskies to their fourth straight conference title. |
Q: When you first took over the women’s program it was a conference contender, but now it has become a power. How has the program gotten to the point that it can win four straight conference titles?
A: It certainly has evolved. We’ve tried to do a few things with our recruiting. Obviously we try to bring talented people in, but we try to bring good people in who want to work hard and really love swimming. Every year I have two goals. I have a goal of bringing in better athletes than we already have on our team, and I have a goal of finding people who nobody else knows about who could grow into those type of athletes. The best people out there are known. They’re putting up the times for everyone to see. And I’d say we (the conference coaches) all get our share of those top recruits. The key to who wins or loses is the next group of athletes — you need to get the people who aren’t very recruited and get them to come in and swim faster for you. We’re an attractive program because of the kind of people we have in our program. So when people come to visit, those who fit in are those who usually like swimming, are hard-working, who want to get better. Then we get a team full of those people and we have a "team" in every sense of the word. A good example is this year when everyone scored in the conference meet. That was the difference between our team and everyone else’s.
Q: How do you foster a setting that encourages effort and teamwork?
A: I think the key is finding the type of person who wants to get better and can get better. The key is setting up the environment. When a kid comes for a visit they get the sense of what your team is like. There are kids who want to go to college and not work very hard. If they get the sense your team is a hard-working group, they tend not to want to come to your school. It’s kind of setting up the environment where we attract the same kind of people who are already here, who are hard-working, good people, who enjoy what they do and are dedicated to it and have balance in their life. The second part is setting up an environment — and it sounds simple, but it doesn’t happen at a lot of places — an environment where it’s really important that they get better than they were in high school. A lot of places kids will go and they won’t get any better than they were when they got there.
Q: How do you break down the recruiting process?
A: It’s more of my team recruiting than me. Say I’ve talked to someone 15 times and maybe I’ve met them in person twice. It’s hard for me to say the person is a hard worker or this or that. It’s hard to say you really know someone in that short a time. When they visit and stay overnight for 48 hours (the typical recruiting visit is a weekend stay), the team can tell if someone is going to fit in, and a recruit also will get a sense if they will fit in here. At the end of the two days most recruits know whether this is the place or not. We try to give them an impression of college life. They meet with me, see a practice or meet, and have an official tour, but that’s about it for structure. They stay with team members and do what the team does. There are some times when the recruit goes to the library because our kids have to go to study. That’s what they do. I want them to see what life in college is like. If you get picked up and you go out to dinner with the coach, stay in a hotel, meet with a few professors, by the time you’re done you don’t know anything about what college life is like. They can read that stuff out of the catalogs. We recently had a kid come up who had to leave with the rest of the dorm in the middle of the night because someone pulled a fire alarm. She had to sit outside in the cold in her shorts for 45 minutes. I wish that didn’t happen, especially on her visit, but at the same time that’s going to happen in college. Someone’s going to pull an alarm. Everyone’s brochure or media guide is really nice. The coaches are always really nice on the phone. Recruits don’t need to hear me say "We’re the best, we’ve won the conference championship four straight years." You need to hear it from the athletes, who are brutally honest about everything from me to the city to the co-op. The key is to have the best and most complete picture of us as possible, but we don’t want to have anything that’s not real. My job is to give the recruits as much information as possible. Get them to know my team as best as possible. and know me as best as possible. Very few kids pick a program where they don’t like the team or like the coach or like the philosophy behind the team. How do we pick the kid? If we do a good enough job, they pick us.
Q: How important is the team’s performance in the classroom?
A: We recruit very good students, who work hard. I think our team attracts that kind of person. That’s the personality of our team. We talk about the GPA and we have a goal. But it’s almost like it doesn’t need to be said. These kids know why they’re here and have a drive to succeed in all aspects of their life. Those are the kids we try to attract. All of them are pretty-much self-motivated.
Q: The swimming & diving team is very active in the community. How does that play a role in the program?
A: We talk about community service and make sure we do at least one community service project per semester. We are in a position to help and teach and it’s a great opportunity to expose our athletes to Boston, its neighborhoods and kids. Earlier this year, we did a clinic for the Girl Scouts of America. We had them here for a meet and then after the meet we got them in the water and gave them a swim clinic. We also had a swim clinic with the Quincy School (a Chinatown K-5 school) and have been involved in a number of other projects. We’ve done volunteer work with autistic children, the Walk for Hunger and been a part of Northeastern service day. It’s an on-going effort we make to stay involved with the community.
Q: What are your future goals for the program?
A: We want to get better all the time. So I guess the next step would be to send relays and individuals to the NCAA Championship meet. We finally in the last two years got two people qualified for the consideration cut, now we just need someone to make the automatic. A lot of years we weren’t close to any cuts. Dea (Adela Gavozdea) obviously was good enough to make the NCAA meet this year (in diving), which is a great step for us. Sarah Reddick and Emily White are both legitimately on the bubble. I hope that in a couple years we will have two or three going to the meet and several others on the bubble.
Q: How satisfying was this season’s America East title?
A: This by far was the most rewarding. UNH was so loaded with a handful of stars. They were taking a lot of points, so the only way to counter that was that everyone had to score for us, which they did. As a coach that was the most rewarding. When everyone gets in on the action it’s great. Whoever scored the fewest points was as important as everyone else because we needed all those points. If we weren’t prepared, we weren’t going to win. No one had won it more than two years in a row until this four-year streak. We’re proud of the accomplishment, but we know that we can’t rest. Everyone else is going hard for that trophy. As soon as I got on the bus after the championship, I thought "Oh my God, we’ve got to try to do this again next year." We’re losing five seniors who had 160 points of the 800-odd points we scored this year. A fifth of the points just walked out the door, that’s huge and will be tough to replace, but we’ll be ready to go again.
