by Glenn Stout
Over the next few years, with help from Sundstrom, Wahle, and Handley, a younger member of the club, Charles Daniels, became the first swimmer to perfect this new stroke. In 1904 he won three gold medals at the Olympic Games, easily defeating swimmers using versions of both the trudgen and the Australian crawl, and in one four-day stretch in 1905, he set a remarkable fourteen world records.
Yet despite Daniels's success, the new stroke had a hard time catching on. Swimmers already trained in the breaststroke and trudgen found it difficult to break old habits and learn new ones, and many instructors, unable to break old habits themselves, considered it a gimmick that might be fine for world-class swimmers but was of little benefit to those who swam less frequently. Others simply did not know how to teach it or else refused to abandon the notion that the leg kick must somehow be directly tied to the arm stroke, unnecessarily complicating the procedure, while many Australians stubbornly stuck with their own version of the stroke.
Nevertheless, Daniels's success secured Handley's reputation as an innovative teacher, and as his own competitive athletic career began to wind down as he reached his midthirties, Handley began to spend more and more time teaching others. When American water polo enthusiasts chose to abandon the rougher American version of the game in favor of the tamer European model in 1911, Handley retired from the sport and began devoting more of his time to swimming. Over the next decade Yale, Princeton, New York University, and the New York Athletic Club all asked for his help and expertise. Handley said yes to them all, refusing to take a salary from any of them. He still viewed athletics as a higher calling, and taking a salary to teach swimming would have violated his commitment to amateurism. At the same time, however, he began writing about swimming, penning short articles and instructionals for newspapers and magazines. In a short time be became the best—and best-known—swimming coach in the entire country.
In 1917, shortly after she created the WSA, Charlotte Epstein asked Handley if he would serve as head coach for the group. In the context of the day, it was like asking the New York Giants legendary manager John McGraw to teach women how to play baseball. But Handley was completely unfettered by prejudice or, by all accounts, sexism. He thought everybody, everywhere, should learn to swim, and quickly agreed.
He may not have realized it at the time, but the opportunity to teach under the auspices of the WSA was an ideal situation. Few members of the association knew how to swim before joining the group, and many were youngsters not even in their teens, with no bad habits to break or preconceived notions to dissuade. The WSA provided Handley with a perfect laboratory in which to perfect his training methods, and an unending stream of subjects of every athletic ability and type upon which to try them out.
Moreover, the group's organizational philosophy, epitomized by the motto Sportsmanship Before Winning, matched Handley's classical notions about the nature of sport. The main focus of the WSA was never the girls and young women with the most talent, but those who could not swim at all, and the development of character was more important than any timed trial. Swimming in competition, and even giving public demonstrations like the one Trudy Ederle attended at Highlands, was done primarily to publicize the larger group and help the WSA reach more and more young women and give them the opportunity to learn how to swim.
After their first session with Handley, the Ederle girls soon became regulars at the basement pool, showing up every Wednesday and Friday evening for their fifty-minute session. They looked forward to seeing Handley calmly walking back and forth along the edge of the pool, never in a rush, completely unhurried, as patient with the novice as he was with the more experienced, completely unbothered by the conditions in the basement pool in Brooklyn—in fact, he barely noticed them. Handley understood that there was no alternative. Except for the rare swim meet, women were simply not allowed in the pools of private clubs such as the New York Athletic Club or the YMCA, and once fall arrived, ocean pools were not a viable alternative for training. Handley was there to teach swimming, and he was determined to do so without regard to either physical conditions or the prejudices that to this point had prevented women from participating in sports.
Of the three Ederle girls, Margaret was initially the most advanced and the most promising. Helen, the oldest, had the most bad habits to break, was less athletic, and although she enjoyed swimming, was not quite as enamored of the sport as her two younger sisters. Trudy clearly loved to swim but was timid, still more of a child than a young woman and, as of yet, lacked her sisters' discipline and drive to learn. But Meg, age thirteen, was at the perfect age for a young woman to join the WSA. She was just going through her adolescent growth spurt and growing stronger and more confident in herself every day. In the WSA she found a host of girls just like herself and responded to the emerging camaraderie of the group.
Handley was convinced that the American crawl was not only the fastest swimming stroke, but, in the long run, the easiest to learn and the most efficient. Few other swimming instructors outside the WSA shared his belief, for few had mastered the stroke themselves. Most believed that the crawl was too advanced for beginners and doggedly taught students the dog paddle, the breaststroke, and then the trudgen, in succession. Handley took the opposite approach, teaching the crawl first, even to those who previously could not swim at all. He later cautioned female swimmers "not to be misled into thinking that old fashioned strokes are the best for them." He may not have known it, but at the time he was probably the only swimming coach in the world who was teaching the American crawl to women.
His method was methodical. Even though Trudy could swim, in her first few sessions he treated her as if she had never even gotten wet before. That could have put Trudy off, but Helen and Meg received the same treatment. The first thing Handley had everyone do was learn to float, to relax in the water and become accustomed to their own buoyancy.
Even Trudy found that a bit difficult at first. Even though she had already spent hours and hours in the water, at nearly every moment she was moving her arms, legs, and hands keeping herself afloat. She had to learn to float without the assistance of her arms and legs, to feel herself half in and half out of the water, to float without having her heart race a thousand miles an hour and without gasping for breath, but breathing as easily as she did when she was reading.
Handley then taught his students how to kick, using the "thrash," so they could gain a sense of just how much their forward movement depended on their legs, and not their arms. This was almost brand-new for Trudy. Although she used her legs when she swam they were something of an afterthought, and this was, perhaps, the most difficult part of the crawl for Trudy to learn. In fact, as she grew older, if there was one flaw in her style, it was her occasional failure to make the most of her leg kick, an imperfection that was offset somewhat by her feet. Trudy's feet were not long, but they were extremely wide and acted almost as paddles when she swam.
Not until Trudy learned the kick to Handley's satisfaction did he even mention the arm stroke, something he first had his students learn by standing in the water—easy to do at the basement pool—bending at the waist until submerged and practicing stroking while walking forward, so they grew accustomed to the feel of the arms pulling through the water. Like most young swimmers, at first Trudy kept her arms too straight and reached out too far, giving her stroke little strength. She had to learn the proper arm position and how to turn her body slightly as her stroke shifted from side to side so she could take full advantage of her shoulder, chest, and back muscles.
The next piece of the puzzle was breathing, which Handley referred to as "deep inspiration," a phrase that not only reminded his students to take full, rather than shallow, breaths, but reinforced his view that one swam primarily for well-being and health than for any other reason. He taught Trudy to breathe in much the same way in which he taught the arm stroke, by having her and the other students stand in the pool then bend at the waist, so their face was in the water.
Onc
e each of the four elements was learned, swimming the crawl was just a matter of putting those four elements together. Of course it wasn't quite that easy, but that was another part of Handley's genius. By breaking the crawl down into its component parts, and having students learn each component isolated from the other, he made the stroke seem easy to learn. When he asked his students to put all the parts together, since they were already proficient in each element beforehand, learning to use them in combination was far less overwhelming than if they had tried to learn the kick and arm stroke and breathing method simultaneously. All the while, he emphasized keeping the body relaxed and the movements slow and deliberate, concentrating on form. Speed would come with experience.
Every week, Trudy learned something new and gained ever more confidence. And that was Handley's real talent. He was a master motivator, smiling easily, gaining the girls' trust, and from the very beginning working on the girls' mental attitude and self-confidence as much as their swimming skills. Despite the prevailing belief that women were—by far—the weaker sex, Handley was his own man and rejected that assessment. Each week he saw more and more young women who only needed an opportunity and some confidence to thrive. The more time he spent with the young women the more convinced he became that they were just as capable of swimming as men were, and perhaps even more so.
Physically, he recognized that due to a higher percentage of body fat women were more buoyant than men and that this gave them a great advantage in the water—it took less energy for a woman to stay afloat than it did for a man. At a time when others were debating the medical wisdom of women doing any kind of physical labor, Handley believed, as he later wrote in his book Swimming for Women, "Any normal girl and woman who is proficient in swimming, healthy and in good condition, will profit by going in [the water] as often as she pleases, even daily." He saw nothing wrong with female swimmers swimming as much as a thousand yards a day if they had the opportunity, suggesting only that any swimmer "rest as soon as one feels tired."
In this way, as Handley taught swimming technique, he also began breaking down psychological obstacles that few women even recognized existed, teaching his students that there were no barriers to their potential achievements. While some of the adult swimmers found such freedom a bit intimidating and began their lessons thinking "I don't think I can" rather than "I can and I will," many of the younger girls, already being raised in a world in which, for the first time, the equality of women was actually being debated and gaining some credence, accepted Handley at his word. His own personal manner exuded confidence. If he thought the girls could do something and told them so, well, they believed they could. It was that simple, and everything he had them do reinforced that notion, for his incremental method of teaching left no place for failure. Some students learned faster than others, and some were more adept, but absolutely everyone learned.
The sessions in the pool were only a beginning. Even during his weekly lessons, half the time he didn't even have the swimmers in the water. At first Trudy and some of the other girls were more than a little puzzled over that—they wanted to swim, after all—but in a very short period of time Trudy realized that Handley's methods worked. The proof was in the pool.
Because access to the water was so limited, Handley gave his students exercises they could do the rest of the week when they had no access to the water at all. He showed them simple drills they could do at home, like sitting in a chair and sticking their legs out and practicing the thrash kick, or bending at the waist and practicing the arm stroke in front of a mirror. He didn't use the term, but all these dry-land drills reinforced the muscle memory that today is recognized as important to any athletic achievement.
Trudy, Meg, and Helen spent hours practicing the drills at home, standing or sitting in front a mirror. They would giggle at one another as they pantomimed the various drills, criticize and cajole one another, all competing with one another for the words they hoped to hear the next time they saw Mr. Handley. A simple "Very good, Miss Ederle, very good," was the greatest praise imaginable and did wonders for Trudy's self-confidence.
Handley did not just teach the students, either. He also taught the other instructors. All WSA coaches, including Handley, were volunteers, and as swimmers became more proficient, they were expected to contribute their time to teach others, and Handley's training routines and methods of instruction were adopted throughout the organization. In short order the WSA created a virtual assembly line of swimming instruction and spat out swimmers and teachers in rapid succession, all of them swimming and teaching Handley's American crawl, the only women in the world who could do so.
For Trudy, almost from the moment she first joined the WSA and fell under the influence of Louis de Breda Handley, if he told her she could do something, she simply accepted it as a fact, without any hesitation. And away from the pool, where Trudy and her two sisters were naturally competitive, they reinforced for one another each and every lesson, physical and mental, Handley was teaching. His manner of coaching swimming was just as influential as his work on the development of the American crawl.
Although none of them knew it at the time, all of Handley's students, including the three Ederle girls, were learning at the hand of a master. In only one short year the best WSA students were already well on their way to becoming the best female swimmers in the world. That was, after all, Handley's goal. The Olympics were on the horizon, and the former Olympian, a true believer in the Olympic ideal, was already preparing his charges to reveal the American crawl to the rest of the world.
While Handley took care of the swimming instruction, Charlotte Epstein handled the administration of the organization, continuing to tout the work of the WSA at every opportunity. Now that the WSA had the blessing of the AAU, Eppie moved quickly. She sensed that the death of the AAU's James Sullivan had removed the biggest impediment to the participation of American women in the Olympics. The 1916 Olympics had been cancelled due to World War I, and now there was increased interest in and awareness of the 1920 Olympics scheduled for Antwerp, Belgium, as the entire world looked toward the games as evidence that the recent nightmare had ended and that it was possible for enemies to come together, put political differences aside, and battle peaceably in the athletic arena.
In the fall and winter of 1918, just as the Ederle girls joined the group, Epstein organized swim meet after swim meet and demonstration after demonstration, raising the profile not only of the WSA and WSA swimmers, but of women's swimming in general. A small cascade of stories in New York's newspapers made women's swim meets almost as common as the baseball box scores and rapidly began moving the sport into the mainstream.
By the beginning of 1919 WSA swimmers, all of whom were learning the American crawl under the tutelage of Handley, were clearly the best in the world, collecting world records at every distance like seashells on the beach. The IOC was already planning to hold women's competitions in the 100- and 300-meter freestyle swims, the 4-by-100-meter relay, and both platform and springboard diving in the 1920 Olympic Games, and in a time of increasing nationalism, the American Olympic Committee (AOC) was feeling pressure to field a women's swimming team to Antwerp.
Although the emphasis on winning went against both her background and the stated goals of the WSA, Charlotte Epstein knew that an appearance in the Olympics would raise the profile not only of women's swimming, but of women's athletics in general. She wanted to make certain that American girls would not only be included in the games, but that they could win, for she knew that if it appeared that the American women's swimming team was likely to medal at the games, the AOC would be far more likely to send a women's team to Antwerp. Besides, as they began to talk about the Olympics to the members of the WSA, and Handley regaled them with his memories of past Olympics, they could sense that young girls like Trudy were beginning to dream, chattering to one another about what it would be like to perform in front of thousands of people and meet athletes from all over the world.
As WS
A swimmers continued to dominate every competition and set nearly every record at nearly every distance, in April 1919 the AAU announced that in 1920 it would sponsor Olympic tryouts and that the AOC would send a women's swimming and diving team to the Olympics. The decision, which only a few years before would have met staunch resistance, scarcely caused a ripple. Dozens of other fledgling women's swimming groups were hastily created all over the country. The first wave of American swimming talent was poised to take on the world.
The Ederle girls, particularly Margaret and Trudy, were beginning to move up in the ranks of WSA swimmers, but none was as yet in the top echelon of the group and under consideration for the Olympic team. Those swimmers who would participate in the Olympic tryouts would be the swimmers that Handley had the most success with, primarily girls who had joined the group soon after it had first formed and had done so while still quite young. Ethelda (Thelda) Bleibtrey, after contracting polio in 1917, which led to a curvature of her spine, had joined the WSA at the age of sixteen early in 1918, as part of her recovery, and within a year was the best swimmer in the group, undefeated at any distance. Young Aileen Riggin, only thirteen, had joined after surviving the Spanish flu to help with her recuperation. Already an accomplished dancer, the sprightly Riggin was not only one of the group's best swimmers but excelled at diving as well. Trudy and Margaret were improving, but were a year behind the groups' best swimmers.