THE HARBINGER
Shawnee Mission East l 7500 Mission Road, PV KS, 66208 l December 3, 2012 l Issue 7 l www.smeharbinger.net
PG 24 Flip for a remembrance of senior Tyler Rathbun
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arsity swim coach Wiley Wright isn’t going to yell at his swimmers if they don’t work hard. That’s not his style; it never has been. He will never say that winning is the most important thing even though he’s won 16 league championships and eight state titles in his 28 years as a coach. He won’t even pester them with questions, asking where they’ve been if they missed a practice. But he will push them. He’ll make them do your best, and more than that -- he’ll make them want to do their best. “We work hard because we want to work hard for Wiley and we want to work hard for each other,” East graduate and former swimmer Corbin Barnds said. “If you don’t work hard, you’re not going to get better. You’re going to be hurting yourself and hurting the team, so we hold ourselves accountable. We wanna work hard because Wiley has done so much for us, so we wanna pay him back.” It’s not his coaching expertise or even the stream of talented swimmers that flow into East each year that has made Wright successful as a coach. It’s the way he runs down the side of the pool at state, yelling “Go, go, go go!” every time his swimmers’ heads bob out of the water to be sure they can hear them. It’s the way he makes every single swimmer feel important by taking each of them aside at some point during practice to ask how school is going. Or how he pulls the group of guys together and forces them to act as one team rather than individuals. *** continued on pg 14
Beloved swim coach changes the lives of his athletes, one by one written by Katie Knight
photo by Jake Crandall