When he was 12 years old Tom Johnson’s father asked him and his twin brother Dave what they planned for a career.
Johnson’s father was a metallurgical engineer who developed metal alloys used in skyscrapers. He had a vision of his sons also becoming engineers, so was shocked when Tom said he wanted to be a swim coach.
“Are you nuts?” Johnson remembers his father saying. “Nobody coaches swimming for a living.”
Johnson has spent close to 50 years training swimmers to perform on the national and international stage. He will be part of Swimming Canada’s coaching staff at the Tokyo Games, his 11th Olympics.
Johnson, currently the performance coach at the High Performance Centre _ Vancouver, has also strived to make being a swim coach a recognizable profession. He remembers a time when if you were applying for a bank loan and said you were a swim coach, the bank manager would ask what your real job was.
“Now there are tons of people making a living coaching sport,” said Johnson, who turns 70 in August. “That was not a thing back then.
“I think there’s a lot of people who don’t understand how easily that thing can slip away.”
Time and technology have changed many aspects of coaching, but the basics remain the same, Johnson said.
“I think you have to be more aware of what’s going on with the mental health side of the equation,” he said. “I do think some of the basic premises are the same.”
Today’s athlete benefits from advances in sport science, understanding nutrition and the wealth of information available to anyone wanting to search the Internet. How that information is packaged and delivered is what makes a successful coach.
“The art of coaching, the actual art of implementing that knowledge and your beliefs and your values, all that sort of stuff still comes down to how well you can deliver the message,” said Johnson.
“Anybody can write a workout, anybody can train a swimmer. But how you do that, and then actually get them to perform on the day still involves that subtly which I think can get lost pretty easily inside of the information that’s out there.”
Over the years Johnson has placed around 50 swimmers on Olympic teams.
This year he has two swimmers heading to Tokyo. Brent Hayden, a former world champion and Olympic bronze medallist at the London 2012 Games, came out of retirement in 2019 and will be attending his fourth Olympics. Backstroker Markus Thormeyer will be attending his second Games.
Other athletes Johnson has sent to the Olympics include Brian Johns (a former short-course world record holder); Marianne Limpert (an Olympic and world championship medallist); Mark Versfeld, (a two-time world championship medallist) Jessica Deglau (a two-time Olympian and Pac Pacific Championship medallist) and Kelly Stefanyshyn (a Commonwealth Games and Pan American Games medallist) and Kuri Kisil, who now trains at the High Performance Centre _ Ontario.
Forging an understanding with an athlete is the key that can unlock success in the pool, Johnson said.
“Every single kid I coach, you try to develop a relationship,” he said. “Everyone is a little bit different. What works with one kid doesn’t necessarily work with another.
“The subtlety of that, understanding that and still being true to who you are, is one of the biggest challenges that’s out there.”
Some of that contact can be lost when coaching at a high performance centre “where’s there’s less of a team dynamic,” Johnson said.
“When you get a team dynamic, you get that synergy working that makes things a lot easier.”
Born in Montreal, Johnson was a 200-metre freestyle swimmer who finished seventh at the 1972 Olympic Trials.
“Not really good enough to make the team,” he said.
Johnson was attending graduate school at the University of Ottawa when his brother Dave called to ask him to help coach at the Pointe-Claire Swim Club. Johnson said no, he planned to finish his degree.
“By November he wore me down,” he said.
By January of 1973 Johnson was coaching his own group. He placed some swimmers on the team that went to the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Tom and Dave Johnson attended the Games as personal coaches for their athletes. That’s when the brothers caught the attention of veteran national team coaches Deryk Snelling and Don Talbot.
“They kind of took us under their wing,” said Johnson. “We’ve been involved in coaching, swimming and being on teams ever since.”
Before coaching, Johnson had spent a season swimming at Simon Fraser University. He was part of the team that won a NAIA championship and fell in love with Vancouver.
“It was a lot warmer than it was in Montreal,” he said. “I said to myself, if I ever get a chance I’m coming back.”
That chance came in 1979 when he was hired to replace American Swimming Coaches Association Hall of Fame member Bill Rose at the Canadian Dolphin Swim Club.
“I was 27 years old and got hired into one of the best swim clubs in the world,” Johnson said. “Of course, all the good swimmers had left. It’s like following in Scotty Bowman’s steps after he had won five Stanley Cups.”
Johnson found success with the Dolphins then would go on to coach the University of British Columbia to numerous national titles.
The High Performance Centre _ Vancouver opened in 1998. Johnson would become head coach.
“As the sport evolved it changed what you were able to do in a club system in Canada,” Johnsons said. “The demands of international swimming were beyond what the club could deliver.”
For Johnson, the biggest reward as a coach is seeing people succeed.
“What really satisfies me is when I see them, not only do that in the water, but also see them grow as people and become productive parts of society,” he said.
“You don’t always get loyalty and you don’t always get gratitude, but when they do come back and sincerely thank you and tell you the positive influence that you had on their lives and attribute their success in their endeavors beyond sport to the lesson that they learned in sport, that makes me feel pretty good.”