By Kira Walters, Staff Writer
It’s your first swim meet of the year. You walk up to the block and take your mark bracing yourself for the loud buzz to start swimming. After speeding across the pool for meters on end, you get to the wall. Gasping for air, you look up to see your coach – and dad – cheering in excitement.
While being a student-athlete is not uncommon, having the opportunity to be coached by a parent is. Both FFHS swim coaches, Robert Trivette and Dave Tonnesen, coach their kids on the team.
Senior Ben Tonnesen and junior Maura Trivette are both accomplished swimmers, making it all the way to the state championships during the 2020-2021 school year and hoping to attend again this season. Their dads are on the pool deck for every early-morning practice and evening meet.
“I think it’s great that my dad coaches me,” Ben said. “He encourages me to keep doing what I love even when I’m not in the pool. It is a really easy way to keep that momentum.”
Robert and Dave have both been coaching long before they had kids. Dave has been coaching since he was eighteen years old, one of his swimmers being his younger sister before his three children started the sport. Robert has been coaching other teams off and on since he was only fifteen. When his oldest daughter was a sophomore, he began coaching the First Flight High School swim team.
“Coaching your child is different. It has its benefits and it has its downsides,” Robert said. “It’s a little harder because you’re a coach and a dad so you feel the excitement of something good happening a little more and the disappointment of something bad happening a little more with your child than the other swimmers.”
Many outsiders to the team may assume that Dave and Robert would have more intense feelings while watching their child swim versus others, but this is something that has rarely occurred over the years, including when Ben and Maura’s older siblings were on the team.
“I’ve never noticed myself treating Ben differently, except I might have a higher level of expectation for him,” Dave said. “If one of my kids were to ever call me ‘dad’ at practice, I wouldn’t respond because when we’re on deck, I’m ‘Coach Dave.’ ”
The athletes also have no problem responding to their “coach” like every other swimmer.
“I respect my dad,” Maura said. “I treat him like my dad out of practice, but I treat him like my coach in practice, so I take what he says and use it to make myself better.”
The fact that the family members enjoy a normal coach/athlete dynamic in the water helps other members of the team see that there isn’t any favoritism involved.
“The coaches take our opinions into consideration, but I think they do their best not to parent their kids while they’re coaching,” junior Laney Dexter said. “They do really well with it.”
The atmosphere of the FFHS swim team is admirable. The coaches welcome all of the swimmers into their homes on nights before meets to have dinner together and get to know each other. Every athlete treats each other with respect, regardless of who it is or what the situation may be.
Junior Logan Thiessen agreed: “They treat all the swimmers as equals and nobody is ever left out.”
After all, one thing swimmers always say they love about their sport is that the entire swim team is like one big family.
“To me, it’s not about coaching my child because I think of all the swimmers as my kids,” Dave said. “When I’m doing meet entries I would do it as if it was for a favorite niece or nephew, so I think of all of them as if they were my own child.”
Sophomore Kira Walters can be reached 24walterski77@daretolearn.org.
