HISTORY OF THE CROWN POINT SWIM CLUB

The Crown Point Swim Club began as the HUB Swim Club.  The beginning of the HUB Swim Club is tied to Hub Pool.  That is where it got its name.  The pool was a community project.  Funds were raised and memberships sold.  A board of directors was elected to run the privately owned pool on public land.  The pool opened in the summer of 1968.  The first pool manager was Les Karafa.  He started a summer swim program, which included a team.  In order to be on the team, you had to be a member of the pool.  This situation continued until the summer of 1975.

A group of parents decided they wanted a year round program and one of them, Jay Lewis, volunteered to be the coach.  They rented pool time at Lowell High School and Hub became a registered AAU team.  Jay was a 1959 graduate of Indiana University and was a member of the first swim team that Dr. James (Doc) Councilman had at IU.

Sometime around 1972 the club hired its first professional coach, Bob Schoenback.  Bob was from Valparaiso and had swum for Skip Bird and was a member of the Valpo YMCA swim program.  Bob had also been the coach that started Munster’s year round swim program and worked with many of the swimmers that went on to be part of Jon Jepsen’s state championship teams.  Bob became the pool manager at Hub and coached the team outside at Hub and indoors at Lowell.  By this time the club was renting a bus to go to Lowell to swim during the school year.  Sign ups were limited to the number that could fit on the bus.

When Crown Point was looking at adding on to the high school, the Hub parent’s stormed the school board and successfully lobbied them to include a pool in the plans.  Corby Sanders was hired in the spring of 1975 to be the aquatic director and boy’s swim coach at the high school.  The Hub parents approached Mr. Sanders about running the pool that summer and Mr. Sanders became the head coach for the Hub Swim Club.  It was that summer that you no longer had to be a member of the pool in order to join the team.  From that point forward there was a separation.  The pool at Crown Point High School opened in February of 1976.  That winter season Joe Crawford coached Hub.  Coach Sanders continued to coach during the next 3 summers.

Corby Sanders left CPHS in 1979 and Ron Coghill became the boy’s coach.  Ron worked with Hub but, as with Corby, was never a year round head coach.  The parents hired someone from Munster.  He had a son that swam for Jepsen and a daughter that swam with Hub.  He pulled his son out of high school and suddenly left for Florida a couple of years later.  There became a rift between him and some of the parents and a few of them started another team through the YMCA.  The Y had taken over the running of Hub pool and that team swam outside.  Hub swam at the high school.  Hub practiced exclusively at the high school until a fire in the auxiliary gym shut the pool for the summer around 1987.  The split between Hub pool and Hub Swim Club had become complete.

Eventually the Y team folded and when the coach left for Florida, Eric Neff and Ken Seaman took over as Hub coaches.  This was somewhere around 1982 or 1983.  The program had lost numbers and began to flourish under Eric & Ken.  Ken also became the girl’s coach at the high school.  They were the coaches until Jim & Brenda Lee took over around 1987.  It was that summer that the club was forced back outside to Hub pool because of the fire.  There has been some on and off connection since.  The banks had foreclosed the mortgages on Hub pool and took it away from the YMCA.  It was at this point that the City of Crown Point took over the pool and it became part of the parks department.

Brenda Lee became the girl’s coach at the high school and the club prospered again under Jim & Brenda.  They left around 1989 and moved to Munster.  The club went through a few coaches and finally ended up in the capable hands of head coach Jeff Kilinski in the summer of 1991.  Sue Boyer joined Hub in the fall of 1992.  The Hub Swim Club continued under the guidance of Jeff Kilinski until he took the head coach position with the Lake Central Barracudas after the Winter Season of 2003-2004.

Bryon Angerman was hired as the high school girl’s coach to partner up with Doug Norris on the boy’s side.  The board hired several coaches until the Winter Season of 2005-2006.  At that point, the board of directors, with the guidance of Coach Angerman, decided to go in a different direction.  The club made a commitment to look for and hire a full time head coach and change the club name to start fresh.  It was the Winter Season of 2005-2006 that the HUB Swim Club switched its name to the Crown Point Swim Club and hired John Krick as the new full time head coach.  As certified ASCA Level 5, Coach Krick, who came over after leading Munster for 8 years and two Age Group State runner up finishes, began the process of maintaining consistency in the coaching staff and a guidance and direction of the program that the board was looking for.

With John Krick as head coach, the club’s Senior level program has been brought back into the fold.  The Crown Point Swim Club has now begun it’s ascent towards the level of National program by scoring its first points at Junior Nationals in club history.