Right away, the parents of April Cheadle received a big hint about what their daughter was born to do. Cheadle hadn't yet turned 2 when she began to imitate swimming strokes on the carpet of the family home.
“I was pawing on my stomach across the carpet as if I was swimming,” Cheadle said. Her parents thought it was funny, but also began to think maybe we should get her in swimming lessons.
“They got me into lessons early on and I have never been without water since because that is what feels close to home,” said Cheadle, now 37 and recently honored as the top masters swim coach in America at the United States Aquatic Sports annual convention at the Hyatt Regency Riverfront in Jacksonville, Fla.
This was the second trip to Jacksonville for Cheadle, the head coach for Bainbridge Aquatic Masters (BAM) on Bainbridge Island. In 2014, she was awarded the Kerry O’Brien most inspirational award.
She also has twice been named Pacific Northwest Association of Masters Swimmers coach of the year and recently received her level 4 coaching certification. She is the only person in the state with that certification and is one of just 29 in the nation.
Hired by the Bainbridge Parks and Recreation in 2010, the affable Cheadle has grown the masters program (ages 18 and up) on the island from 69 swimmers to 170. But maybe that should not be unexpected because Cheadle, who gave herself to Jesus Christ when she was just 4 years old, is interested in just not her athletes as swimmers, but as people. In return, her athletes of all levels of skill get improvements in their swimming ability and in their personal life.
Her swimmers also participate in fundraisers like Arms Around Bainbridge, in which athletes swim in relay fashion around the Island after raising funds for each leg of the journey to go toward assisting community members.
“She is an amazing coach,” said Ken Bennett, who has been in the program for five years. “She really, really is inclusive. We have swimmers of all different levels – evening swimmers, high school and college, elite swimmers and people who are relatively new to the sport.
“She has an amazing ability to know where you are and what you need in terms of instruction and has a savvy encouraging style. I joined five years ago after not swimming for 30 years and I’m addicted now. It’s just a fun program. She makes it fun. The workouts are hard, but fun.”
Cheadle competed in club swimming and at Wenatchee’s Eastmont High School, where she qualified for state each year. Her senior year, in fall 1998, she captained an Eastmont team that finished third in the state. Cheadle took second in the state in the 200 freestyle, fifth in the 500 freestyle and was on the state-winning medley relay team.
These achievements got her to the University of Washington, where her grandfather (Gordon Cheadle) and father (Bruce Cheadle) both attended.
Cheadle laughs because, she said, “You put me in a land sport and I would trip over my own feet. It’s quite different in the water. It was my dream to swim in college. Most people didn’t think I would make it.”
How wrong they were. She was there when athletic director Barbara Hedges cut the program in 2000 only to reinstate it after protests (the program was axed for good in 2009 but the Save Husky Swimming people are working to get it back). She qualified for the Pac-10 Championships all four years and was on the 800 freestyle relay team that made the NCAA Tournament.
Besides learning how to swim better each step of the way, Cheadle was blessed to have coaches who allowed her to coach her peers
“My club (Jack and Jean Davisson) and my high school (Carolyn MaGee) coaches recognized my desire to learn and be coachable and to help others around me,” Cheadle said. “My college coach (Mickey Wender, now head women’s coach at Army) allowed me to coach the club kids and those we had at clinics.”
That came easy for Cheadle, because of a Christian faith that allows her to see the good in people.
“I do love people,” she said, “so for me it’s making the connection with that person, It is so much more than just the swimming. It’s making that connection and helping in their life and their world. Lots of people bring their world to the pool and sometimes we are negligence with what happens with life, and we can get respite from that in the pool.”
Cheadle was hired back with her club team when she graduated from Washington and was a reading specialist at her old high school when the 2008 recession hit and her job disappeared. She went back to school and got her elementary education teaching certificate, but found it difficult in that economic climate to get a full-time job. Teachers who had planned to retire hung on to their jobs.
“In a lot of ways I felt like I was piecing lots of jobs together just to make things work,” she said. “I am a Christian and Christ follower and I felt I was being led to look elsewhere. I was kind of being led out of my comfort zone and away from my old stomping grounds. Everything I knew was at Eastmont and Yakima Valley. I was praying ‘Lord, can you find a place where I can piece this thing together, either coaching or teaching.”
Cheadle had lot of interviews and kept coming in second. She interviewed with Bainbridge in 2010 and was selected.
It proved to be a great fit for Bainbridge and her because she not only had a full-time job in coaching, but would be able to move close to her grandparents, who live in Silverdale and Poulsbo.
“She just really has an incredible skill to observe and help athletes improve their strokes,” said Jim Stretch, a former swimmer at Cal-Irvine who is back after a five-year job absence and has been in the program since 2012. “She has a whole quiver full of stroke skills to help competitive swimmers, to personal improvement swimmers to personal condition swimmers help them obtain their goals.
“She is very affable, very approachable, is clearly inspirational and has a gift to motivate to excellence. We have a broad spectrum of ability on our team and she doesn’t focus her attention on just the elite swimmer. Her attention is on everybody.”
Cheadle said: “For the challenges of life, thankfully, the water is a constant. I see (the athlete) as a whole and not as a swimmer. I care deeply for them and ultimately when athletes leave, whether they take away the skill, I want them to know they are cared for and loved.”
Terry Mosher is a former sports writer at the Kitsap Sun who publishes The Sports Paper at sportspaper.org. Reach him at [email protected].
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