New Boys Swim Coach Starts off Season with Dual Meet Success

The Hartford-Slinger boys swim team started off the season with a new head coach and have already started the season in a better place than last season, as they have won one dual meet, against West Bend West, whom the team has not beat in nine years.

Head coach MacGyver Zepezauer was previously the assistant coach for Ori-owls the past three seasons. He has also been a Lake Country swim coach for roughly eight years. Zepezauer unexpectedly became the head coach, when the previous head coach Marcie Norton moved.

“It was an unexpected opportunity, but that's what I had in mind when I originally started coaching for Lake Country, which was also unexpected,” Zepezauer said. “So I hopped on that, and this opportunity as well and it's gone quite well so far.”

Being the previous assistant coach, swimmers already knew the coaching style of Zepezauer, which has not changed much.

“He's been our assistant coach for nearly my entire four years and he's been coaching with the Lake Country Swim Team for about eight so I mean he's not too experienced but he's definitely keeping us all in check,” senior Bobby Klockhow said.

Even though Zepezauer might be young and not as experienced, he is still helping bring the swim team to success.

“While Coach MacGyver is young, he brings a lot of experience from coaching at the club level,” assistant coach Troy Hagen said. “He possesses a deep knowledge of the sport and that will ultimately help raise the level of the performance from this team and future teams.”

As the new head coach, Zepezauer has not made any major changes to the coaching of the swim team. However he is trying to teach the swimmers to push through fatigue during races.

“Out of my five years coaching overall, not a single one of them has been the same,” Zepezauer said. “It depends on the athletes we have; it varies year to year athletes are going to be able to coach someway, and other athletes you'll have to go a completely different route.”

While not much has changed in the coaching, the team has improved since last season. Even though they lost some swimmers, Hagen said they have more talent in the fewer numbers.

“So far this season we've been looking pretty good,” Klockhow said. “I definitely think that we can get to a point where we last year and so far this year we beat West Bend, and we haven't done that in a long time.”

Klockhow said that the team did not win any dual meets last season, and because they have already had one success, they are doing “pretty darn good.”