Big Ten swimming is like Big Ten football, the best; and Indiana University's swimming team is the best in the Big Ten. Last week at Oak Park, Ill., the Hoosiers showed how good they are by winning the A.A.U. National Outdoor championship for the sixth year in a row, scoring more than twice as many team points as the nearest competitor.
The main reason for Indiana's dominance is Coach James ("Doc") Counsilman, 42, a paunchy, deceptively placid-looking thinker who sums up his approach to training in three jarring words: "hurt, pain, agony." Pushing toward "the ultimate in stress without physical damage," he puts swimmers through hard pool workouts seven days a week, plus calisthenics and isometric exercises. Under the "interval" method that Counsilman follows, swimmers sprint 50 meters and pause for 25 seconds, keeping that up through 40 sprints. He drives himself hard, too, often working a 5 a.m.-to-midnight day. "Hurt, pain, agony swimmers," he says, "need a hurt, pain, agony coach."
Under Counsilman's coaching, Indiana has not lost a two-team meet since 1959. Long an also-swam in Big Ten competition, Indiana demonstrated its new superiority in 1960 by trouncing Michigan, the perennial national champion, and snapping a Wolverine string of 33 straight dual-meet victories. In celebration, Indiana swimmers dumped Counsilman, clothes and all, into the pool. That year four of Counsilman's swimmers made the 17-man U.S. Olympic team, won three gold medals, one silver, one bronze. Members of the present Indiana squad hold world records for the medley relay, individual medley (Ted Stickels), backstroke (Tom Stock) and breast stroke (Chet Jastremski).
Honors have piled up for Counsilman. Indiana recently awarded him its 1963 Leather Medal for bringing "the most distinction to the university." (Among the previous winners: Sexpert Alfred Kinsey, Nobel Prizewinning Geneticist Hermann Muller.) The A.A.U. has just named him head coach of the U.S.'s 1964 Olympic swimming team. And five rival Big Ten swimming coaches, for whom Counsilman's success has meant nothing but hurt, pain, agony, have paid him an ultimate tribute: they refuse to compete against Indiana in a two-team meet.