Main story: Gilroy Gators learn discipline, focus and gain maturity

Coaches focus workouts on the fundamentals of competitive swimming

Photo by Keira Silver Left: Brooke Rogers, 14, and Linda Diakova, 10, practice their kicks.

By Keira Silver

With routine practices, a welcoming team environment, and experienced coaches, the young swimmers of the Gilroy Gators make a splash both in and out of the pool as they develop valuable qualities for life including discipline, maturity and academic focus.

Among them is Linda Diakova, a 10-year-old fourth grader at Rucker Elementary School. She loves competing at swim meets because she feels happy when she comes in first in a race and wins a ribbon. It helps build her confidence and self-esteem.

“It feels really great for me, and I know it’s just a swim meet, but it feels like I won the Olympics or something bigger,” she said during a poolside interview at Christopher High School right before getting into the water.

Diakova switched from gymnastics to swimming during the COVID-19 quarantine. She enjoys both sports, but swimming for the Gators requires a more intense time commitment.

“I have swim meets and more practices, but it’s also funner (because) it’s nice to swim during the summer,” she said.

Coach Jud Shutts and Assistant Coach Noelle Cullen, mother of two swimmers and a Rucker Elementary School teacher.

A practice session usually lasts an hour and a half for her age group. She starts by warming up for a couple hundred yards. Then she transitions to drills and kick-board laps, after which she spends a lot of time routine swimming for the various strokes, her best being backstroke. She completes her practice by doing sprints to prepare her for an upcoming swim meet.

The farthest she’s ever traveled for a meet is Salinas. She hopes to continue her passion for swimming in high school.

Diakova encourages other young Gilroy athletes to try out for the Gators because of the physical fitness and mental discipline development.

“It’s a good sport, and even if you don’t have a lot of time and you can’t commit, then you can always join one of the smaller groups — and it’s only three or four times a week,” she said. “You keep in shape, and you just feel better about yourself. You feel more confident because you swim more, and you feel like you’re part of a team.”

Gilroy High School freshman Brooke Rogers, 14, joined the Gators a few years ago and enjoys all the benefits the sport of competitive swimming offers — including physical fitness and camaraderie.

“I’ve been swimming since I was six or seven, and I just love the water,” she said. “It’s good for building strength. You can just make a lot of new friends. I used to live in San Jose, so I used to go to a swim team there. So, when we moved here, I joined the Gilroy Gators to continue swimming.”

Her favorite stroke is freestyle, but she also enjoys doing butterfly because not a lot of other swimmers do it well. She finds it’s fun but also challenging.

She enjoys the competitive atmosphere swimming at a meet. During the past years she’s learned to channel her mental energy to deal with the adrenalin.

“When you first step on the (diving) block, your nerves are just high and your heart is racing,” she said. “But once you get in the water that all disappears, and you’re just focused on swimming, doing your best, getting your best time. And, you know, trying to get first. But it’s mostly your time that counts. So, it’s just really an experience.”

Rogers appreciates the beneficial training her coaches give her. They’re always nice and help her fix her stroke and kicking form. They’re “just super cool” and easy to talk to, she said. She hopes to continue swimming at the college level.

“Swimming’s going to be hard definitely, but it’s going to be fun,” she said. “You’re going to learn lots of new things, you’re going to build muscle. You can be a whole new person there. And you can meet tons of new people and make tons of new friends.”

The Gators have four coaches on the team working with four different age groups. Among them is Jud Shutts, the head coach, who has about a dozen years total experience. This is his third year with the team. Previously, he coached in Hollister and also in Watsonville at Monte Vista Christian School.

“My favorite part of coaching is watching the kids have fun,” he said. “And when they swim a new personal best time, that is exciting for them, and that is exciting for me. It’s watching them grow up and get better.”

Shutts began swimming as a youth in Palo Alto. As a teen, he swam for coach George Haines in the world-famous Santa Clara Swim Club, when half the team was the Olympic swim team in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. He attended the University of Oregon on a four-year scholarship for swimming.

The Gilroy Gators provides a year-round program, practicing five days a week. The end of their swim season is in August, just before school starts. They’ll stop for winter break.

Shutts focuses the workouts on the fundamentals of swimming. He often alters the practices to prepare the athletes for the specifics of a meet depending on which team they will face.

“We will try to get in mileage during the beginning of the season, then we try to taper toward when we get closer to the final meet,” he said. “I like my coaches to teach technique more than yardage, so we’ll spend a lot of time with teaching the right stroke, changing the kids’ stroke, so that they are as efficient as they possibly can be in the water.”

The rigorous training shows results. The Gators get 80 to 90 percent personal bests on all of their swimmers. The team now has 70 swimmers in various age groups, ranging from age 4 to high school seniors.

The youngest are in the Water Lizards group, next is Mighty Gators, then Cruisin’ Crocs, and the Senior Group made up of high schoolers. Shutts would like to build the team up to as much as 120 athletes, reaching pre-pandemic levels.

“The pandemic shut down all swimming pools,” he said. “What I observed is we lost most of our senior swimmers, and kids that were toward the end of middle school and those who were in high school. Homeschooling didn’t help us either. They found other things to do and then got out of shape, and it was hard to come back.”

Swimming on a team not only helps the athletes develop their physical fitness, but it also improves their minds so they do better academically, Shutts believes.

“Swimmers, because they spend so much time in the water, have so much thinking time, so they are generally more academically in tune than other sports,” he said. “We find as a whole their grade point average per kid is generally quite high, higher than any other sport that I know of. That’s especially true in college and high school.”

Keira Silver will be a senior at Christopher High School. Gilroy Life publisher Marty Cheek helped her with this story.