Long Live Chris DeSantis Coaching
The last time I could say that simply “coaching”, standing on a pool deck and instructing swimmers and all the less fun parts therein, was my full time job was September of 2015. Five years later, nearly to the date, I will once again be able to say that I am a “coach”. I will join a team, I will coach a group of swimmers and a few other things i’ll fill you in on later.
For now, I want to announce a major shift in “Chris DeSantis Coaching”. I started Chris DeSantis Coaching in the fall of 2016, with some reluctance if I’m being honest. I had just moved from Denmark back to America, and I didn’t really see myself as an entrepreneur.
I’d done a bit of “consulting” work in Denmark, thanks to the kindness of Claus Buus and Carsten Ramsdahl, but I hadn’t thought of making that my full-time job. To be honest I was a bit lost.
At the urging of some friends and fellow alumni of the Masters in Applied Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania, I gave it a shot. I’d like to thank Sherri Fisher for her endless empathy, Conrad Macalalad for asking “why not?” as many times as I needed to hear it, and finally Carlton Galbreath, who became my coach and taught me many knew things (and many things I didn’t know i knew).
The first year of Chris DeSantis Coaching saw my return to writing, which has been a great outlet for me ever since. I also finally started putting what I knew about Positive Psychology out into the world. A special thanks to Erik Wiken, who gave me my first audience of athletes and coaches to speak to.
Now Claus Buus in Denmark also managed to introduce me to Milt Nelms, who I met standing in a speedo gazing out at a swim competition in Farum, Denmark. I was awestruck and babbled for a bit before exchanging contact information.
i would later get an e-mail from Nelms that begin perhaps the most valuable mentorship that I have ever received in the sport. To this day, if “Uncle Milt” calls, my family knows i can drop everything and just hang on the phone.
Through Milt I had the chance to get out to watch him work with Grand Canyon University under the hospitality of Steve Schaffer. I probably learned more that weekend than at all my other coaching conferences combined. I also met another friend: Dirk Marshall, who was actually running a swim club in a way that made sense to me.
Dirk and I embarked on a partnership to bring Positive Psychology to his club practicing out of the University of Houston. I got to really see Texas for the first time in my life and had too much fun working with Dirk and the Bridge Bats.
After a year of continued visits to Houston, I got a call from Ryan Wochomurka from University of Houston. He was interested in Positive Psychology, and gave me the opportunity to work with his team. I’m forever grateful for that, because it was my entry into working with collegiate programs.
Working with Houston opened a number of doors to me. I was able to meet Matt Leach at Washington State University and get in on the ground floor of a program rebuilding. I got to stand on deck when WSU had its first NCAA qualifier in nearly a decade.
The surprising development at Houston was that i met someone who has now become one of my closest friends in this profession, Hannah Burandt. Hannah and I have been able to help each other at various crucial junctures over the past few years, and I can’t imagine a world in which I hadn’t met her.
When Hannah moved on to become a head coach at Cleveland State, I got a first hand look at what is now my favorite collegiate program in the country. I even became a donor because i believe so strongly in what’s happening at CSU.
Another chance meeting led me to the most extensive involvement I’ve ever had with any team, The Jersey Wahoos, and one of the only pieces of work I never had to jump on an airplane to do. I’m grateful for having met Paul Donovan, who never fails to challenge my assumptions when I least expect.
Finally, a big dose of gratitude to Kate, who always believed in me as an entrepreneur (still does believe, to be factually correct).
As of March, I was standing on deck at CSU, trying to expand the number of college programs I would work with in the coming year. Then came the event that has changed everything, for everyone.
So What Now?
Now that I’ve finished with the gratitude section, let me start to explain what will happen next. it’s not fair to say that Chris DeSantis coaching is closing up shop. I have the privilege of not having to do this, since I had almost no overhead invested in the business and it was “just me”.
There will, however, be a shift in focus. I am taking a “real job”, one I hope to fill you all in within the next couple weeks. With that, I will be devoting the majority of my time to that and fitting in Chris DeSantis Coaching around that and my other full-time job, raising two kids.
I plan on continuing to write. I can’t promise that moving from being “just me” to having a job won’t affect my writing. I will have a team to consider whenever I publish something. You can assume though that anyone who has hired me is well aware of what I write about it and generally doesn’t take issue with what I write about in this space.
So, unfortunately that means that I will continue to call out other swim coaches for their behavior, whether it’s Mark Schubert/Beelzebub or the CEO of Sean Hutchison’s 2010-2018 image rehabilitation campaign.
I’ll also face the prickly challenge of writing about insights i get from coaching day to day without feeling like I’m violating the privacy of those I work with. I’ve been there before, and hopefully it’ll be a bit easier.
So, goodbye to the first chapter of Chris DeSantis Coaching, and welcome to the second. If it’s anywhere as good as the first, then I’m an extremely lucky man.