EDWARDSVILLE – Ever since Elizabeth McPherson began competitive swimming, being a coach has been a goal of hers.
McPherson, who recently graduated from Edwardsville High School and will be attending Illinois State University in Normal this fall – where she will also swim for the Redbirds while majoring in exercise science and possibly psychology – is still swimming for the Waterworks swimming club in Edwardsville during the Southwestern Illinois Swim Association season.
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But McPherson has also taken on additional duties for the Marlins – that of being the team's coach in addition to swimming for the Marlins.
“By my seventh- or eighth-grade coach, I volunteered with the rookies (first-year swimmers), and from that, I started building connections with my coaches at the time and they moved me to rookies coach, then moved up to assistant coach and finally, when David (Albers) left this year (as Marlins coach), they decided I was most qualified to be head coach this year,” McPherson said.
Coaching the Marlins while still swimming is, in McPherson's words, “super-awesome”; it had been a goal of McPherson's to coach, but McPherson thought it would happen “not this soon; I thought maybe, my sophomore year of college, they would move me up. It's really awesome I get to do it now, though, that I can get used to it and hopefully, I can get better at it; I like it.”
McPherson enjoys the coaching aspect of swimming because, as she said, “it's a way for me to connect with the swimmers I have in a way I haven't done before; I've been their teammate, but never in the same age group as them, so I don't get to hang out with some of those kids as much.
“Now, I get to know them at a different level, I get to teach them different techniques, I can help them with strokes and hopefully further and better them in their swimming career, which I wouldn't be able to do if I was just a teammate.”
McPherson got involved with swimming in kind of an unusual way – her brother wanted to swim, but McPherson didn't necessarily want to. “My brother wanted to swim and I did not,” McPherson said. “Since he wanted to do it, my mom said I had to do it because we were both young and she didn't want to drive us everywhere. My brother started at Waterworks and then I had to do it, so I've stuck with it ever since.
“I'm glad I stuck with it because I never would have made the friends or gotten the opportunities I've had without it. Being in swimming has taught me a lot about just like regular values I have as a person. It's taught me patience, you have to be trustworthy and you have to have a work ethic – a lot of it – and not only does it also help with me in athletics, (it helps) with my goals I have career-wise and in my interactions with people; I think it helps a lot.”
Being involved with swimming has given McPherson many memories, especially swimming with Edwardsville High. “Those are some of the best meets I've ever been to,” McPherson said, “especially the IHSA state meets; those are best. You will never go to a swim meet as hyped up as that one was because the crowd is crazy, everyone's doing The Wave and the crowd is nearly on top of you while you're swimming; it was so awesome.”
Being a coach can be a difficult task to begin with, but McPherson has gotten advice on how to handle different ways to coach from her EHS coach, Christian Rhoten. “(Rhoten has) helped me out,” McPherson said, “and they've told me whatever I need, I can ask them and they can help me. I know I've learned a lot from their coaching; they have different coaching styles, but they're also like kind of the same, so I'm trying to play off of that.”
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