In 2025, the Marin Swim League is celebrating its gold anniversary.
This milestone will be marked at the championship meet at College of Marin Indian Valley on June 28. Along with the usual races and relays among the teams, the event will also feature an alumni relay and a wall of stories from past participants. Did MSL have an impact on you? You can share your story here.
IT’S A QUARTER past eight in the morning on this first Saturday in May, but veteran parents have already staked out the primo shady spots around the pool at San Rafael High, where the home-team Swimarin Sharks are about to take on the Rolling Hills Stingrays. It’s opening day of the 51st season of the Marin Swim League. Excitable girls are writing “Eat My Bubbles” on the backs of their friends. Parent volunteers are still working the bugs out. “Someone needs to help the people hanging the flags,” says one exasperated dad. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
“You better round up your relay,” a stressed mother is telling her teenage son, whose pronounced bed-head and catatonic expression suggest he was asleep as recently as 15 minutes ago. “They’re gonna start pretty soon!”
On the other side of the pool, beneath the huge “Shark Warning” sign, Laura Nagel and her 8-year-old daughter Elise are engaged in a tense negotiation that is being played out at MSL meets all over the county this morning:
“No, not a doughnut. How about a bagel?”
The MSL consists of 10 teams and roughly 1,400 swimmers. The vast majority of those youngsters don’t go on to swim in college. Many won’t even swim for their high school teams. They are practicing, on average, three times a week because their friends are doing it, because they love the camaraderie and competition and field trips. They’re also doing it thanks to a tiny nudge from their parents, who enjoy the company of the other parents.
“I came to see the meets as a kind of enforced relaxation,” says Michael Dubois, whose sons Keenan and Lucas swim for Sleepy Hollow. “You work your ass off all week, then come to the pool and hang out with a bunch of people you really like.” For a long time, his phone couldn’t get a signal at the Sleepy Hollow Pool. “And that was a good thing.”
While scratching a social itch, MSL parents are also giving their children a huge gift: a lifetime of water safety skills.
“My husband surfs, we spend a lot of time around the water, so that was our first goal, for our kids to be strong, confident swimmers,” Nagel explains at the Swimarin/Rolling Hills meet, moments before young Elise walks triumphantly past, bearing a glazed doughnut the size of a life preserver.
The MSL has turned out some amazing swimmers down through the decades. Before Rick DeMont won gold in the 400 freestyle at the 1972 Olympics — he was later stripped of his medal for taking asthma medication the U.S. Olympic Committee had assured him it was OK to take — he dominated the league as a member of Ann Curtis Swim Club in San Rafael. Curtis, herself a multiple gold medalist at the 1948 London Olympics, later founded Swimarin in 1981. That club served as a springboard for Ben Wildman-Tobriner, who earned a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics for the U.S. men’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay.
But DeMont, Wildman-Tobriner and, more recently, the Lo sisters — ex–Sleepy Hollow Sea Lions Kaitlyn and Alyssa Lo are currently water polo stars at Stanford — are pretty much the outliers in this league. For driven youngsters seeking a more intense experience — swimmers who aspire to compete at the college level, for the most part — there are two USA Swimming–level clubs (formerly known as AAU): North Bay Aquatics and the Marin Pirates. While some of the better MSL teams are ratcheting up the commitment expected from some swimmers, turning it into a year-round sport for them, the focus is still overwhelmingly on fun. Always has been.
“Of course we wanted the kids to improve their times,” Bill Anderson says. “But the main emphasis was to have a good time.” Anderson, a star swimmer at Redwood High in the early ’60s, started coaching the Marin Peninsula Club in 1963 — while he was a high school senior. He gave his swimmers milk shakes if they recorded a best time. “One summer we gave out 250 milk shakes,” he recalls.
Anderson, 66, has to raise his voice to be heard over the bedlam created by something called the “ping pong ball–noodle relay” taking place at the Sleepy Hollow preseason practice. Four of his grandsons now swim for the Sea Lions, who are coached by his son, Mark, who has presided over Sleepy Hollow’s incredible dynastic run. His team — whose official motto, “Family, Friendship, Sportsmanship,” is only slightly at odds with its signature sign-off, “Kick Bootyakum!” — has not lost a meet since 1999. They’ve won 18 straight MSL championships.
That meet streak is looking … imperiled. Last season, the Sea Lions ventured into Scott Valley — notorious around the league for its hostile signage — and barely eked out a 283-277 victory against the Sea Serpents. Coached by Paul Stasiowski, Scott Valley has been inexorably closing the gap between itself and Sleepy Hollow. “I’ve known Paul forever,” Anderson says. “I swam against him when we were kids. He’s done a great job with that program.”
Asked to identify the ingredients in his team’s long-term success, Anderson is quick to acknowledge his debt to “a lot of big families with strong swimmers.” Those families, and the Sleepy Hollow community, have given him far more than victories in the pool. During his senior season at Marin Catholic, in 1990, Anderson signed on as an assistant coach for the Sea Lions. His mother and father had advised him against it, warning, “The parents will drive you crazy.” But with the club offering the princely sum of $474 a month, how could he say no?
That season, Anderson coached and swam for the Sea Lions. By this time, his mother was gravely ill. Liz Anderson passed that July, at the age of 43. Five days later, three of her boys — Mark, Bill and Mike — won “high point” trophies at the MSL meet. “Almost the entire team showed up for her funeral,” recalls Mark. “From then on, people kept an eye out for us.”
Among the families providing him and his sibs extraordinary support were the Hennessys — Anderson’s longtime friend and mentor, Brian Hennessy, is now the head swim coach at Drake High — and the sprawling Smith clan, 10 children strong. The formidable roster of Smith swimmers included Julie, the nation’s top recruit in the breaststroke her senior year at Marin Catholic. Following a stellar career at UC Berkeley, Julie was hired as a Sea Lions assistant in 1993 by the team’s new head coach, Mark Anderson.
“Within a month,” he recounts with a grin and a gleam in his eye, “we were dating.” When he was 14, Anderson remembers, the Sea Lions knocked off the mighty Tiburon Peninsula Club, which has since left the MSL, but which was the Sleepy Hollow of its day. “It was pandemonium around here,” he recalls.
Is this the year the Sea Lions are upset? It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, says Anderson. “We’re living in a fantasy world where Sleepy Hollow wins everything. Competition is good. It makes us better.” He sounds less sanguine on the pool deck two weeks later, warning his charges that they needed to “eat, sleep and breathe Scott Valley, because they’re coming after you.” It’s possible that he is peeved by the Sea Lions’ most recent meet, a narrower-than-expected victory over the muchimproved Strawberry Seals.
Unlike the established MSL powers, the Seals don’t have a pool they can call home. Younger age groups practice at the Strawberry Recreation District pool starting at 3:30 p.m., after which Nick Wooters hops in his car for the two-mile drive to Tam High, where he coaches the older kids until 7:30 p.m. “It’s true, we don’t have a home,” says Wooters with a smile, “and that ends up making us closer. That’s what makes it special. Everyone has to be all-in, because otherwise it wouldn’t work.” Even when the Seals were losing almost every meet, says Marta Sato, who swam for the club and later served as an assistant coach, “we were always the team that wanted to out-cheer the opponent. You’re not going to find another team that has quite the same spirit.” Aside from being one of the most improved clubs in the MSL, the Seals have to be one of its happiest. They take their cue from the irrepressible Wooters, a former collegiate swimmer at Loyola University in Baltimore (where he befriended another Baltimore-based swimmer — guy by the name of Phelps). Seven years ago, Wooters walked away from his online advertising gig to get back into coaching. He’s now in his second year as head coach of the Seals, and he laces practices with relay races and games like rockpaper- scissors. “If I win, they have to do the set I say. They win, they get to choose.”
The emphasis, early on, is on technique rather than volume. And fun. The Seals have a secret high-five, a weekly movie night, a team campout and a buddy system, encouraging teenagers to befriend and mentor the newbies. From Scott Valley’s “Mom’s Night Out” and “Bolinas Surf Day” to the Marinwood Water Devils’ “Bowling Night” to the Tidalwaves’ “Bingo Night,” this sort of team-building is very much the norm in the MSL.
The Seals work hard, but they work smart. “I don’t want this to feel like a job,” says Wooters, distilling the ethos of the MSL into a declarative sentence. “You can work an 8-year-old hard to make him the fastest 8-year-old he or she can be. But by the time they’re 10 or 11, they’ll be burned out on swimming.”
Behind him, the Seal Pups are mustering for their 3:30 p.m. practice, a gaggle of 5- and 6-year-olds with pipe-cleaner limbs and on whose heads the goggles seem gigantic. It isn’t quite 3:30, yet they are crowding the edge of the pool, waiting for the coach to finish talking. They literally cannot wait to get in the water.
