Holland Pushes Championship Streak to 2
November 17, 2012
By Jon Malavolti
Special to Second Half
ROCHESTER – After wading through three straight runner-up finishes before claiming its first MHSAA title last fall, Holland High won its second straight Lower Peninsula Division 2 girls swimming and diving championship Saturday at Oakland University.
“The girls did a great job,” Dutch coach Don Kimble said. “We had some kids that really swam really well. It’s tough to replace a team like we did last year. We had a great senior class last year, tough shoes to fill. They stepped up. There was a lot of pressure was on them.”
Holland won all three relays and finished first in four individual races, eventually ending up with 311.5 points.
Sophomore Taylor Garcia led the way, winning the 100-yard butterfly and 100 backstroke, as well as competing on the first-place 200 medley and 400 freestyle relays. She was named the Swimmer of the Year by the Michigan Interscholastic Swim Coaches Association.
Garcia said winning the award was “very humbling.”
“I’m glad I had my team here to help me accomplish it,” she said.
Garcia added that it was a great experience for her team to defend its title.
“Especially after last year, it was just an incredible year, and I think to come back and prove that we still have a lot of talent in our program, I think it says a lot about how far we’ve come,” she said.
The addition of new squads, along with some annual powerhouses, made the meet a competitive one.
“This is a faster meet this year than it was last year,” Grosse Pointe South coach Eric Gunderson said. “The cuts were faster to get in, the top 16, and top 8 times across the board were faster.”
Rochester Adams coach Tim Hickey called the meet “insanely fast.”
“We had a few new teams in our division, which really made things a lot faster this year.”
One of the new additions to Division 2 was this year’s second-place finisher – Ann Arbor Skyline. The Eagles ended up with 255.5 points.
“We’re so proud,” Skyline junior Shannon Cowley said. “We have so many awesome people. I could not be happier.”
Skyline coach Maureen Isaac said her team, which swam at the Division 1 Final last year, performed well in preliminaries and was glad to see it carry over into the finals.
“Yesterday we did what we wanted to do, they were perfect Friday swims, and we also knew we hadn’t scored one point,” Isaac said. “So we had to come back and do it today, and the preparation really fell into place for us.”
Senior Ashleigh Shanley paced the Eagles, winning the 200 individual medley and 100 breaststroke titles, while also swimming on the second-place 400 relay and third-place 200 medley relay.
Isaac said that the team knew it had a “huge opportunity” to do well this year – which was just the program’s fifth of existence.
“It’s just been an unbelievable experience,” she said of the Eagles’ growth. “You don’t have any baggage, every rule is your own, every expectation for the kids. It is an exceptional situation, and I know part of it is because we got to start from scratch and really build it how we wanted to. And they have completely bought into it.”
Kimble had high praise for Holland’s next closest finisher, impressed by how far they’ve come.
“The addition of Skyline was great,” he said. “That speaks to those kids and the parents and the coaches; everybody’s put in time. That’s a unique situation where they’ve grown, it’s tough to start on the ground floor like that. But very good job.”
The day’s lone record-breaking performance came in the diving competition, as Walled Lake Western senior Allie Murphy finished first with 442.80 points – just enough to edge the old record of 441.80 set by Holland’s Paige Kortman in 2009.
“I’ve been working hard all season to get state champion,” Murphy said. “The record is a bonus.”
Murphy said she was looking up the record recently and figured she was capable of doing it, and was excited to accomplish it. Yet things didn’t start out in record-breaking fashion, as she struck the board on one of her early attempts during the finals.
“I got really nervous,” Murphy said.
But she bounced back quickly.
“I had to focus on the next dive,” she said. “Had to brush it off, had to realize I was still in the game.”
The MHSAA title is Murphy’s second Division 2 diving championship. She also won in 2010, but finished second in last fall.
Murphy’s diving coach at Western, Casey Guntzviller, said her concentration and focus was “really impressive” at the finals.
“Something as simple as hitting the board can set you off, but instead she garnered her focus and strength and really finished strong,” he said.
PHOTO: Swimmers take off during a race at the Lower Peninsula Division 2 Final on Saturday at Oakland University. (Click to see more from HighSchoolSportsScene.com.)
Longtime Coach's Legendary Expertise Keeps Manistee Surging
By
Tom Spencer
Special for MHSAA.com
November 19, 2021
Name any high school or community pool in Michigan, and odds are Corey Van Fleet has been there.
Perhaps it is true of any pool in the United States.
He might have even helped build it.
And, a little more odds. If the pool hosted an MHSAA Finals meet, one of Van Fleet’s teams likely participated. Although he won’t have any qualifiers making the trip to the Division 3 girls meet Friday, he’s been to championship weekend lots of times with Birmingham Seaholm and Manistee. His 1962-65 Seaholm boys teams won four straight Class A Finals, and his Manistee boys team is coming off a Finals trip last winter and its best season ever.
Van Fleet, now 85 years young, is in his 68th of coaching swimmers. He’s spent the last 13 with the boys and girls teams of Manistee High School. He started the program after helping build the pool.
The school utilizes the Paine Aquatics Center named after Bill Paine, who presented a proposal to the City of Manistee, the Manistee Area Public Schools and Van Fleet. Paine’s proposal called for the pool, which opened in July 2009, to be attached to the high school facilities.
“So I’m sitting in my office one day and this tall, lanky guy (Paine) walks in and closes the door and says my wife and I want to donate an aquatics complex in Manistee, and Sandy Saylor says you know something about swimming,” Van Fleet recalls. “‘Will you help me build it?’
“We talked about it for a while and I said yeah, I’d help him,” Van Fleet continued. “So we ended up with a nice eight-lane swimming pool in Manistee.”
Van Fleet, who also had coached at Florida State, coached and served as athletic director at Oakland University and then served as AD at Long Beach State (Calif.) during an illustrious career at the college level, took the next step naturally.
“The superintendent of schools at the time (Robert Olsen) said you build the darn thing, you might as well get some programs started,” Van Fleet recalled. “That was 13 years ago, and I’m still at it.”
At it, Van Fleet continues. He plans to stay with it until he just can’t do it anymore.
“I am still fairly healthy,” he said. “If I can find six people that can carry me out of church, I can think about quitting.”
During his tenure at Manistee, Van Fleet’s teams have dominated the Coastal Conference and produced multiple academic all-state swimmers. The boys team captured the 2020 academic all-state title with a 3.82 team grade point average.
“I am most proud, I think, about our academic progress,” Van Fleet said. “We take great pride in passing some classes.”
Van Fleet is also filled with pride when he reflects on all the swimmers he’s seen go on to become lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers and coaches.
“I am pleased with the number of kids who have gone on to do some pretty big things in the world off our swimming programs,” he said. “I’d like to think they might have learned lessons about goal planning and sticking to it and hard work and all that stuff.
“That’s what lights me up.”
Van Fleet’s initial high school coaching job was at Madison Heights in 1959. He’s coached at camps all over Michigan, including his first at Burt Lake in 1954. Today he owns and operates a summer swimming camp in Irons, 30 miles southeast of Manistee. He also built it.
Jeff Brunner, a veteran MHSAA official in multiple sports including swimming, and father of former members of the Traverse City high school swimming co-op, is among many singing praises of Van Fleet’s impact on the sport.
“Corey has a wealth of information that he has accumulated in his coaching career,” Brunner said. “If I was a high school swimmer, I’d want to learn all I could from him – swimming for him would be such a unique opportunity.”
Andrew Huber, principal of Manistee’s middle and high schools, agrees with Brunner.
“We're humbled to have had Corey as part of our school and community,” he said. “His wealth of experience, knowledge, and relationship building has helped create a foundation of well-being for students and adults alike.
“His enthusiasm for swimming is infectious, and his energy is amazing for anyone regardless of age,” he continued. “It's been truly impressive to observe him connect and inspire students for the many years he's been in Manistee, and realize his impact is generational.”
The Manistee boys swim team starts practice next week. The Chippewas, along with their girls squad, have battled through COVID. The pandemic is one of many changes through which Van Fleet has guided his athletes.
“We’ve seen changes in training methods,” he said. “We’ve seen changes in diet.
“We’ve seen changes in philosophies in terms of what’s important and what’s not important,” he went on. “Kids have changed, and parents have changed.”
Training methods have been modified the most, along with new multi-lane pools popping up in Michigan, Van Fleet noted.
“Swimming is more technical now,” he said. “The science of swimming has become paramount.
“It is not just going in and kick a few legs and swim a few hundreds and go home — we’ve gone the gamut,” he continued. “It is very specific now every time you want a kid to do something, and now our swimming pools are showplaces – they are magnificent.”
Tom Spencer is a longtime MHSAA-registered basketball and soccer official, and former softball and baseball official, and he also has coached in the northern Lower Peninsula area. He previously has written for the Saginaw News, Bay County Sports Page and Midland Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Manistee, Wexford, Missaukee, Roscommon, Ogemaw, Iosco, Alcona, Oscoda, Crawford, Kalkaska, Grand Traverse, Benzie, Leelanau, Antrim, Otsego, Montmorency, Alpena, Presque Isle, Cheboygan, Charlevoix and Emmet counties.
PHOTOS (Top) Corey Van Fleet (far right) visits with his Manistee girls team the wall honoring him at Oakland University. (Middle) Van Fleet is in his 68th year coaching swimming. (Photos courtesy of the Manistee girls swimming & diving program.)