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Two old men sat at the back of a downtown meeting room, as the Montgomery YMCA Barracudas swimmers and parents awaited the start of a special lecture a few months ago.
The crowd was to hear Don Gambril, 83, five-time Olympic swimming coach and 17-year University of Alabama coach.
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Coach Blake delCarmen of the Montgomery YMCA Barracudas is a longtime friend of Coach Don Gambril and asked him to come to Montgomery to address swimmers, community and various YMCA staff. The two men first met when delCarmen was checking identification of people entering the University of Alabama swimming complex. Gambril pointed to a big sign with his name on it and suggested he didn’t need an ID card; delCarmen conceded. He coached Coach Gambril’s grandson on a Tuscaloosa swim club, Crimson Tide Aquatics, before coaching the Barracudas.
When introducing Gambril, delCarmen said his old friend advised him to “work them a little harder.”
Gambril became a self-taught swimmer at the age of 9, performing some version of the crawl stroke with his head out of the water, what coaches refer to as the Tarzan drill when they make their teams do it.
Later Gambril added his own version of the backstroke, knowing it was time to turn when he ran his head into the end of the pool.
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After getting some coaching as a swimmer in junior college, Gambril continued at California State University Los Angeles, earning two degrees there.
Hired as a high school football coach, Gambril took on coaching swimming as an additional duty. It became his major duty.
Serving in the Navy, 1955-57, Gambril was on a ship that docked in Sydney, Australia, during the week that swimming was on the 1956 Olympic agenda. From then on, making the Olympics was a goal for swimmers he coached.
I was the other old guy in back, having participated in my last Southeastern Conference swimming meet in a University of Georgia tank suit in 1965. I had the good fortune to talk to Gambril for about 20 minutes before he spoke and a few minutes after.
I told him a coach who later served as executive director of College Swimming Coaches Association of America replaced me, the two-year volunteer coach of the Clemson University women’s swimming team in 1976. At the same time he succeeded an engineering professor who had been coaching the men’s team since the era when men’s competitive swimming suits had shoulder straps.
I brought up travel as an aid to recruiting, thinking of my Georgia coach’s January season start: a meet at Florida State University in Tallahassee on Thursday, University of Florida in Gainesville on Friday and University of Miami on Saturday, followed by a 13-hour drive back to Athens on Sunday. His perspective involved international travel.
Gambril’s presentation included emphasis on hard work, rest, good nutrition and paying attention to the coach. He said a 14-mile bicycle ride on a newspaper route built up his aerobic conditioning before he became a serious swimmer.
Inspired by Gambril, I decided to swim a mile and a half, 2,650 yards, in my next morning’s workout at the Barracudas home pool. In an unintended tribute to his early swimming, I clanged my head into the stainless-steel gutter at the deep end on one of my early backstroke laps.
A longtime newspaperman, Coke Ellington worked for the Montgomery Advertiser from 1984 to 1997. He taught in the Alabama State University communications department from 1997 to 2014.