Perhaps it was a coincidence that on the final day of the Minnesota boys swimming and diving season, Hutchinson lost its original Tigershark.
Or perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence at all.
Hours before members of the Hutchinson boys swimming team prepared to compete in the state finals Saturday, Jerry Carlson, the team’s founder and a Minnesota swimming luminary, died. He was 85.
Carlson leaves behind his wife, Malene, and two sons, Jon and Dan. But he also leaves behind a legacy that stretches from the depths of the middle school pool named in his honor to every corner of the country, instilled in the hundreds of Hutchinson boys and girls he helped develop through decades of teaching, coaching and mentoring.
“Jerry meant everything to our program, both the boys and girls,” Hutchinson’s current swimming coach, Rory Fairbanks, said. “Being the first coach, the founder of the club team (High Tides), without him you don’t know if we’d even have a program in town. He’s been an advocate for both programs all the way through.”
“He really was like a second dad for all of us,” said Justin VandenBerg, a Hutchinson graduate and former member of the Tigersharks. “After swimming a race, I'd always go and talk with him and get his thoughts on how it went. One moment that still sticks with me to this day is from state finals in 2005 after my 200 individual medley: He came up to me after my race and said, ‘I’m glad I could finally get you to finish the race.’ It's not that I've not finished in the past, but that I finally swam the way he knew I could.”
Carlson grew up in Ely. Like many great coaches, he learned from a superior mentor, hall of fame coach Leonard Klun. In high school, Carlson raced to several top places at state in the 200-yard freestyle and helped his team win a state title in 1949 and runner-up in 1950. After high school, Carlson spent the next four years at Gustavus Adolphus College where he trained under hall of fame coach Vic Gustafson and won MIAC Championships in the 220- and 100-yard freestyle events.
In some ways, Hutchinson has Gustafson to thank for its swimming programs. Carlson’s first teaching job was in Colorado, but on Gustafson’s encouragement, Carlson returned to Minnesota and was hired at Hutchinson High School.
Carlson founded the Tigersharks boys swimming team in the 1961-62 season and coached for 46 years until his retirement in 2007. In 1975 he also founded Hutchinson’s U.S. Swim Club, which today is known as the High Tides. He was inducted into the Minnesota Swimming and Diving Coaches Association hall of fame in 2005.
Although he did not coach Hutchinson’s girls team, he was a consistent presence at practices and meets, and was not shy about offering advice when he thought it was needed.
“He would come in my first couple years as coach,” said Fairbanks, who started coaching the girls team in 2000 and took over as the boys coach after Carlson retired. “He was there pretty much every day to make sure that I was the right guy to be leading our programs. He never said a bad thing about what we were doing, but he was there watching and giving assistance when needed, whether you asked for it or not. If he saw something to help a kid out, he would jump right in there and coach them up, even after he retired.”
Carlson was described as “gruff” and a “no-nonsense” type of coach by those who knew him.
"I can still hear his voice echoing across the pool yelling at everyone to get back to work and stop screwing around,” VandenBerg said.
But that tough exterior couldn’t disguise his genuine care for the people he mentored.
“There wasn’t a coach that I respected more,” said Dan Hatten, another Hutchinson graduate and former swimmer. “He was somebody that, as a coach, he could get more out of his student athletes than they even thought possible. He had that ability, and he had the ability to keep you humble.”
“He was the coach that would remember every one of his swimmer’s times from when they were in seventh grade all the way until they were a senior,” VandenBerg said.
Carlson’s toughness especially showed in 1998, the first year Minnesota switched to a two-class system. Although Hutchinson qualified for Class A with the smaller schools, he opted to move up to Class AA for four years and won a state championship in 1998 and runner-up in 1999.
But while Carlson’s work helped establish Hutchinson as a perennial powerhouse in Minnesota swimming, he wasn’t just training kids to be great swimmers. He was training them to be great people.
“You always knew what was important,” Hatten said. “Obviously you're on an athletic team to win, but there was so much more to it in regards to how you did it. The work and preparation you put in and what that meant later as you grew up. … He’s one of those people in my life that I will always credit for the things that I’ve been able to achieve.”
