NCAA News Archive - 2001

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'Kenyon magic' makes foes see smoke on the water
20-year celebration of women's championships


Sep 10, 2001 12:50:45 PM


The NCAA News

Jim Steen has to plan for a post-championship dunking in chlorine every single year. The women's and men's swimming and diving head coach at Division III Kenyon College, Steen and his teams took home 17 consecutive women's NCAA championships -- from 1984 to 2000 -- and his string of 21 consecutive men's NCAA championships is still alive.

Steen is a 13-time Division III coach of the year, a seven-time winner of the American Coaches Association Award for Excellence and the 1994 recipient of the National Collegiate and Scholastic Swimming Trophy.

Steen has coached no fewer than 286 women and men all-American swimmers who have together earned 2,284 all-America awards since his arrival at Kenyon in 1976.

Even with all of those athletics awards, Steen remains most proud of his teams' academic accomplishments. Just this year, Kenyon boasted two female NCAA postgraduate scholarship winners and two male NCAA postgraduate scholarship winners -- all swimmers in Steen's program.

Over the last 20 years, the swim teams at Kenyon have maintained a higher graduation rate, a higher cumulative grade-point average and a higher percentage of honors graduates than the college's student body as a whole.

"I have never mentioned the word 'dynasty,' " Steen told Sports Illustrated a few years ago. "The word just doesn't fit us. What we think about is topping ourselves, going one better. I put a lot of energy and passion into coaching, but I feel guilty that I never expect to win. Basically, Kenyon swimmers are a group of ordinary swimmers who are great one weekend in March. That's when the Kenyon magic takes over."


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