Word: merritts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Head Coach Bill Brooks, top Harvard man from 1946 until last year had, in his advanced age and failing health, relinquished actual running of the team to assistant coaches Benn Merritt and Harold Miroff. During the first part of last season it was assumed by most people that Merritt would become head coach upon Bill Brooks's retirement. He was reluctant to exercise power over the man he admired and would hopefully be replacing. But Brooks had no real knowledge of the internal disputes on the team and wasn't used to making decisions, thinking his assistant coaches could handle...
When the committee was first formed sentiment around the IAB was that it simply was a formality before naming Benn Merritt as head coach. Bill Brooks was heard to say, "I brought Benn here 12 years ago so that he could be head coach upon my retirement." The team recognized that Benn was the natural man for the job, for he had been with the team and was universally liked as a great person who treated swimmers as people. Some of the swimmers, particularly those who had come from big-time programs were dissatisfied with his coaching ability...
...possible choices included just about every big name coach in the U.S., including George Haines. Indiana's Doc Counsilman, Long Beach's Don Gambril, and USC's Peter Dayland. The list was whittled down, coaches flown in for interviewing, and the committee came down to their final two prospects--Merritt and Gambril. The vote was 4-3 for Benn, nevertheless Gambril was hired as Harvard's new head swimming coach. Baron Pittenger described what happened this way. "Undergraduates on a selection committee will always choose the known over the unknown. Their personal loyalty gets in the way of objectively looking...
Harvard told Gambril that he could bring his own staff with him, but he decided that he wanted assistant coach Benn Merritt, also a candidate for the head job, to stay in his presest position. However, if the Corporation approves, Gambril will bring Skip Kenney as the diving coach, a job now held by Harold Miroff...
...years ago at the Casablanca. Cahalan took him there and bought him a gin and tonic. When Krause finished it, he threw the glass over his shoulder and broke it, Cahalan recalls. He went through four more drinks-and four more glasses-before Cahalan escorted him out the door. Merritt, however, prefers to talk about the many times when Krause has been an inspiration to the people around him. At this year's Easterns, for instance, when Villanova's Tom Aretz was officially relegated from an obvious first to fifth because he failed to hit the automatic timing devise, Krause...