Prep Grad Back In Pool As Coach

FROM THE SCRANTON TIMES

March 23, 2008

Auther: Chad Jennings

PREP GRAD BACK IN POOL AS COACH

She takes the picture everywhere she goes. Takes it to practice. Takes it on the road. Takes it to international swimming meets where Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps is just another competitor.

She takes the picture because without the woman in it, there would be no practice, no need to go on the road, no chance to roam pool decks next to Olympians.

Kathleen Klein Prindle was 8 when that photo was taken. In it she's wearing the first swimming medal she ever won, and she's sitting next to her grandmother, Jule  Holleran  Igoe.

It was Igoe who taught Prindle to swim, and when Prindle stepped away from the sport in college, it was Igoe who told her, "If it's right for you, you'll be back."

Of course, grandmother was right.

At 36 years old, Prindle has found her way back to the pool and then some. She started coming back by coaching an age group team not long after college, and today she's the assistant coach of the National team at Coral Springs Swim Club in Florida, coaching more than a dozen Olympic hopefuls.

It's a long way from the family cottage on Lake Winola, but Prindle still finds a little bit of home in the sport her grandmother taught her.

"I'm not doing it for her, I'm doing it for me," Prindle said. "But I'm grateful to her everyday for bringing me to this place."

Familiar passion

As a kid, Prindle had no idea her grandmother had been to the Olympic Trials. No clue that the woman teaching her to freestyle had once competed against the nation's best.

When Igoe's career ended, she settled into a life of family and coaching, spending time with her five children, six grandchildren and the countless local kids who she taught to swim in the Scranton area.

Igoe died of leukemia in 1995, so we'll never get the chance to ask, but it seems safe to assume that Prindle was one of her favorite students, if not her very favorite.

"That really helped bond us at a really early age," Prindle said.

Prindle started swimming when she was about 4 years old. By the time she was 10, Prindle was helping her grandmother give lessons. In high school, she was a Scranton Prep standout.

"Swimming really defined who I was as a high school student," Prindle said. "I didn't have time to let my grades slip and I didn't have time to go to too many wild parties."

After graduation in 1989, though, Prindle wanted to define her life outside of the pool. She went to Penn State, but with her grandmother's blessing, she elected not to walk on to the Nittany Lions swimming team.

Instead, she became vice president of her sorority, took an internship at Disney and studied abroad in Germany. When she graduated college, Prindle moved to New Jersey to take a "girly girl" job working in fashion in New York City.

"I just kept remembering my grandmother asking me, 'Where's the swimming pool? Have you found the pool?'" Prindle said. "Because she always found a swimming pool everywhere we went."

Needing a way to unwind from the city, Prindle did in fact find the pool.

And just like that, just as her grandmother expected, she was back.

Finding her own way

Of all the pools in New Jersey in 1994, Prindle happened to find the one at the Stevens Institute of Technology. And it just so happened, the swimming coach at Stevens was trying find someone to start a Learn to Swim program and coach an age group team.

It was the kind of thing Prindle's grandmother would have loved, and Prindle jumped at the chance.

After getting over the monumental decision to stop swimming in college -- "My whole first year I couldn't really walk by the pool because I would burst into tears," she said -- Prindle had started lifeguarding and swimming recreationally at Penn State. In New Jersey, she became a fashion guru by day, swim coach by night.

"It's just part of me," she said. "I couldn't get away from it."

For roughly eight years, Prindle worked for Liz Claiborne and built the Hoboken swimming program. She continued to teach swimming during a brief relocation to Washington D.C., and when she and her husband decided to find a warmer climate in 2002, Prindle found herself in swimming rich southern Florida.

With no friends or family in the area, Prindle found something that reminded her of home. She started to teach swimming lessons -- just like her grandmother -- then she got a coaching offer from a private school called Grandview Prep -- which reminded her of Scranton Prep.

While coaching at Grandview in 2006, Prindle was approached by Michael Lohberg. The name that might mean nothing to most of the world, it meant a lot to Prindle.

He was the Olympic swimming coach for Germany six times, and he remains one of the foremost swimming coaches in the world.

And he wanted Prindle to work for him.

Uncharted waters

First day of work at Lohberg's Coral Springs Swim Club, Prindle walked onto the pool deck and was introduced to nine-time Olympic medalist Dara Torres. At which point, Prindle said, she started laughing.

"She's my swimming hero," Prindle explained. "I had posters of her on my wall at Prep"

It was the first of many moments Prindle realized this wasn't Lake Winola and this wasn't a Learn to Swim program.

At Coral Springs, Prindle works with the world's elite. Her national team trains with the club's international swimmers -- they range from Burgaria to New Zealand to Venezuala -- and of the 40 or so swimmers on the team, Prindle expects 10 to 12 to qualify for the Olympics.

For those who do qualify, Prindle plans to be right there with them in Beijing this summer.

Her job, as always, will be to watch and evaluate. She knows the strokes, and even if she can't swim them as fast as her athletes, she can help her athletes go faster.

When she realized that, it didn't take long for the shock of a Dara Torres spotting to wear off.

"Now, of course, you just become accustomed to it," Prindle said. "There are mistakes all over the place... It's humbling but sometimes you go, 'Well they don't know anything either.' We're all learning as we go."

And Prindle feels like her grandmother is right there, going along with her.

First time she went to a national competition, Prindle took her grandmother's old stopwatch. When she goes to the Olympiic Trials this summer, she plans to take her grandmother's Olympic Trials participation medal. And, of course, there's that ever-present photograph.

"Swimming and coaching connects me to her in a way that I never have connected to anyone else in my life," Prindle said. "I feel like that's the best way to honor her is to try to emulate her. It's very emotional for me, swimming."

Wouldn't you know it, everytime she looks at that picture, her grandmother is smiling.

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Credit: STAFF WRITER

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