Like any good coach, Linda Tenhunen is on a perpetual search for knowledge.

Thankfully for the Nickel City Aquatics, the retired physician who balanced her volunteer duties as club head coach with the busy demands of her career for quite a while does not limit her never-ending quest for information to simply the technical understanding of the four major strokes.

Tenhunen was recently selected as one of just two inaugural recipients of the cash award that is attached to the Clifford Barry Follow Your Heart Excellence Project, a Swimming Canada initiative that honours the long-time coach who was instrumental in the development of Olympian Victor Davis, but was equally at ease with those just getting comfortable in the water.

It’s that latter stream that so appealed to Tenhunen, her passion rewarded with a $5000 grant to address some of the challenges seen at the entry level for athletes to the sport. “Clifford Barry was very interested in grassroots coaching and was very involved in coaching at the grassroots level – and above,” noted the local woman who was also feted with the Lea Bredschneider Award (Swim Ontario) in 2021.

“One of the things that I have noticed over the years is that there is lots and lots of programming – webinars, seminars, etc ... – that are for higher performance but not a lot of programming for grassroots coaching, novice coaching, coaching at the development level,” said Tenhunen. “As a non-swimmer, for me, I have had to seek hard to get information on that stream.”

This same focus was highlighted in the Swimming Canada media release that formally announced the granting of funds to both Tenhunen and Janet Hyslop (Kenora Swimming Sharks). “I would like to find a coach that has been coaching for 30 years and loves coaching 10-and-unders,” Tenhunen explained.

“My goal would be to seek out those experts and bring them to my club so they could teach my assistants how to better coach your youngest levels.”

With roughly a month or so behind her to contemplate how to best utilize the funding, Tenhunen has expanded the scope of that concept a little more. “There are people out there who do it really well,” she said, alluding to the development on very young swimmers. “I want to visit the clubs that are doing it well and see what they are doing.”

“What are they doing, holistically speaking, in terms of their whole curriculum, and what are they doing in the water – the drills, the skills, the practice set-up.”

And while it was a pitched project geared at helping newcomers to swimming that was the direction favoured by Tenhunen with this particular request, the trust is that the highly-active Sudburian actually coaches both the novices and the senior swimmers with NCA.

“There is not a level I don’t enjoy coaching,” she said. “For me, coaching is endlessly fascinating at every single level. Each level has its own challenges. And there is a lot that I took from my medical career and would bring over to coaching in terms of listening and compassion and teaching.”

“A lot of that crosses over,” she added.

One new initiative that perhaps borrows on strategies that have enjoyed a degree of success in the past is to target a more collaborative approach to the coaching fraternity within the district of Swim Ontario in which the NCA, Valley East Waves, Sudbury Laurentian Swim Club and so many others reside.

“I wanted to reformulate NEOR club coaching and bring coaches together for what I would call interclub training experiences,” she said. Next month, four visiting clubs will gather at the Gatchell Pool in Sudbury, with each club coach heading up one of the training sessions.

“If you’re getting better as a coach, you’re questioning what you are doing and testing what you are doing all the time,” said Tenhunen. “A lot of what is out there is dogma based on what you were taught by your coach as a former swimmer – and that’s not necessarily the way it has to be.”

“I’m just a seeker” – and a very well recognized one, as such.