This piece was originally published in the compilation “Shadows off the Lake”, written by the Chicago Writer’s class of 2014. It has been slightly modified from its original version. 

Video courtesy of Jake Durburg (Class of 2016)

In sports, there are coaches. Some are cut from the Lombardi cloth, disciplinarians in every aspect of the word.  Some truly nurture the “spirit” of the individual; those who push their athletes to find themselves—realizing that cross country and running can be an outlet for thought, or that wrestling can serve as a channel for a violent temper. Even their yoga trainer may assist in them in uncovering themselves and the complexity of their cluttered minds as high schoolers. Coaches win games and build teams. They make athletes and sometimes champions out of seemingly commonplace people. Coaches inspire and motivate, are dedicated and perseverant, and ultimately have the ability to change the lives of young men and women for the brief time that they are under their tutelage. There are thousands of remarkable coaches.

And there is Cindy Dell.

Like most any public pool, the Aquatics Center at Lake Forest High School, is always tight for swim time. All sorts of swimmers have honed their stroke of choice between the blue and yellow trimmed partitions of the LFHS Swimming Pool. As you walk along the athletic Wall of Fame hallway that lies directly east of the pool, or saunter into the East Campus Competition gym that lies just south of that narrow corridor of honor, you will find accolades and accomplishments that note the school’s rich history in swimming and diving. There, you will find conference champions, Lake County record holders, IHSA State Champions, and even Olympic gold medalists honored with pictures from their high school years—seated near the front entrance of the school with their relay teams, along the shores of the nearby Lake Michigan, or candidly enthused in their most remarkable moments of triumph.

Behind all of that success, though, and the plaques, trophies, ribbons, and medals that reward the accomplishments of these young student-athletes, again, lies Cindy Dell.

If you’ve spent much time at the high school, either before school in the wee hours of the morning when the sun has not yet risen over Lake Michigan, during the chaotic six-hour school day, or the after school hours filled with extracurricular activities, you can’t miss Cindy Dell. She is not recognized because of her size or stature—Cindy stands at a diminutive yet authoritative 5’2—but rather because of her voice. Even in those early morning hours when her swim team strolls in a shade before 6:00 A.M. to begin their morning routine, groggy and inattentive, Cindy’s trademark smile is wide awake. “Somehow she’s always more awake than all of us. I’m fifteen, she’s…I don’t know, but she always has more energy than me,” said sophomore swimmer Joey Franklin (now a college freshman at DePauw University) in his first year under Dell’s direct guidance on the Boys’ Varsity Swim Team.

Yet it’s not just her constant get-up-and-go mentality from coaching in the morning that gets her athletes going. It’s her own participation. As a colleague of Cindy’s, I vividly remember wandering down to the basement weight room on some nondescript weekday afternoon to run on the treadmill. There, in perspiration and exhaustion, I found the swim team completing a circuit plyometric workout, among them was Cindy Dell. Doing the tricep dips, waving the heavy ropes high above her head, jumping over stationary benches, and completing the last inverted sit-ups with the heels of her tiny shoes pressed against the medicine ball. I left that day feeling empowered that athletes at Lake Forest were coached by such a powerful role model. They were in the best of hands. The kids were exhausted. And so was Cindy, rightfully so. She had fronted a spirited workout with one of the more successful high school swim teams in Lake County; a lot of these young men would go on to be college swimmers, very successful athletes in their own right, and there was Cindy, cheering them on with the “one more time’s” and the “finish strong’s” as she completed the workout herself. For the Boys’ Varsity Swim Team, Cindy Dell plans the workout, does the workout, drives the bus, coaches, leads, congratulates, consoles, and then drives the bus home.

That is infectious leadership.  

Nonetheless, for a lot of these young men, they are conditioned to this universally atypical behavior, for Cindy Dell has been the only swim coach they’ve ever had. Since 1990—some two and a half decades ago—Cindy Dell started coaching swimming at the Lake Forest Club.  In these lessons, she would teach everything from the basics of the breaststroke to even as modest a task as how to breathe underwater. The lessons here are much simpler than the intricacies of the 200 M Butterfly that she would teach these same kids years later, but the spirit of Cindy would be the exact same, completely unremitted. For many swimmers who hail from Lake Forest, a town that lends itself to “country club kids”, Cindy has been their second mother. She was with them from their tadpole stages with freckles and missing teeth, into their full-grown frog years, chockfull of girlfriends, acne, and high drama of the high school kind.

The most noteworthy trademark of the 2nd mother expression may be the fact that many of these kids she has influenced are hardly the swimmers that line that narrow Hall of Fame corridor of individual and team state champions. In fact, they are sometimes the last ones out of the pool. While the crowd is enticed with the excitement of the race’s finish, Cindy will often be down at the opposite end of the pool, cheering boisterously for a young swimmer who succeeded in his first flip turn, far, far away from the champion’s podium.  

As a mother of her own, Cindy nurtured her son Jason, her daughter Ashley, and her youngest son Rudy to success in athletics. In fact, Ashley’s swim plaque hangs amongst Lake Forest’s elite in that Wall of Fame hallway treating them exactly the way that she treated all of her athletes over the course of the last ten years at the high school. Ashley has now followed her mother’s lead into a coaching career at Southern Methodist University, where she–much like her mother–inspires young people to dream bigger, to do more, and to push harder.

 Joey Franklin, a young man whom I had in class that describes himself as “a less than noteworthy swimmer,” made clear to me the trademark of Cindy Dell at Lake Forest High School. “I’m terrible. I’m really not good at all. I’m not saying they’re calling me Michael Phelps now, but when I started…oh boy,” a sheepish grin came across his face. The young man was then a junior, still on the JV team, not even Cindy’s direct jurisdiction or level, but he is still kicking and grabbing for the final wall. “Cindy’s favorites aren’t always the best [swimmers]; all you have to do is push yourself to your own limits, and she’ll run through traffic for you. She’ll listen to anything you have to say—about anything. She just cares…and honestly, trust me, I’m not winning her too many swim meets.”

So, when the winter sports season rolls around in late November, I may have eight students out of forty enrolled boys in class signed up for the swim team. Of the 71 boys that are active members, some may look to be athletic; others scrawny, while still some you wouldn’t think in a million years would have the confidence to don a speedo in front of an audience. You may wonder why swimming is so often the sport of choice for so many teenagers looking to build camaraderie and competition, while seeking guidance form a mentor in their already stress-ridden lives. More athletes than boys and girls basketball combined, wrestling, cheerleading, or pom pons. That same sport that has more 6 A.M practices than any other. It’s not the prestige or popularity that comes associated with the status of being on the swim team, and it certainly isn’t the uniforms. It is because of the confidence that is instilled in you from the person at the top—no matter who you are, what your splits are, what event you participate in, or how many attempts it takes you to execute your first flawless flip-turn.  

The answer is Cindy Dell.