Scott Swanson
At this Friday’s season-opening high school swim meet at Sweet Home pool, chances are an elderly man will be sitting on an elevated lifeguard’s chair near the finish area.
Bruce West has been there for years – more than a quarter of a century, to be exact – helping his friend Doug Peargin track the progress of the Husky swimmers.
West, who is nearing 79, is responsible for keeping track of the splits – the time it takes each swimmer to swim a lap – during races.
Peargin, longtime head coach of the high school swim program and is nearing 70 himself, said West is “the only guy I’ve ever met who, with a stopwatch, can get every kid in the pool and get every lap at the same time.”
During practices, West stands next to the blocks as the Huskies swim laps. Now and then he’ll walk over to a swimmer and offer a bit of personal coaching on stroke technique, breathing and more.
West himself is a veteran competitor or coach in nearly every interscholastic sport. He’s played or coached football, basketball, baseball, track and field, cross-country, wrestling, diving, swimming, softball and golf – all of them successfully in the win-loss columns.
“I never was a swimmer,” he said. “But I’ve watched enough to know how to do things and I’ve gone to clinics with Doug. That’s always been my forte, to be able to pick up on technique without necessarily doing it myself. I can pick up on little things they might be having trouble with. I think maybe that’s one of the things that’s been a gift of mine – I can teach kids an awful lot of things.”
West was born and raised in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where he competed in football, boxing, track and baseball in high school, playing tight end and outside linebacker on the gridiron though he weighed only 122 pounds.
“I inherited quite a bit of ability from my dad,” he said. “He was a pro baseball player. He had a major league contract but ended up injuring his ankle before he got to the majors.”
West’s older brother had played football – their father only let him play one year – and was named all-state for his performance during that single season, West said.
West himself was a four-year varsity player in baseball, but when a couple of his teammates were offered football scholarships to the University of Idaho, he decided to walk on. He was up to 165 by this point.
“I figured nobody had talked to me about going to college other than my high school coach, but I had the idea that I was better than the two that had a ride,” West said. “I went out there and turned out for football and I ended up being the only starter on the freshman team that didn’t have a ride.”
He completed the Army ROTC program at Idaho and was waiting for his orders when his high school football coach called him up and asked him to help out with the football team, beginning West’s coaching career in 1954.
His Army career lasted from 1955 to 1957. He served as a battery commander in the Nike missile program in the Seattle area and rose to the rank of 1st Lieutenant.
While in the service, West also got talked into going out for the post football team by a friend who had played at the University of Oklahoma. West said he wondered if he’d be able to do well, but ended up getting more playing time than his friend.
“We had seven guys who had pro contracts on the team,” he said. “All the rest of them had played college ball. Some were all-conference. It was not too bad of a team.”
But neither was the competition.
“We were 50-50. Every team we played had more guys with pro contracts than we did.”
After two years in the Army, he decided to go back to civilian life when his tour ended.
He spent a couple more years as an assistant coach at Idaho Falls, but it was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to be the head coach there, so he moved to Boise, where he took a job selling sporting goods.
“I ended up running a ski shop,” he said. “I got to go skiing once a week.”
Meanwhile, the superintendent and principal of the small high school in Parma, Idaho, contacted West and offered him a job coaching there. He had a choice: baseball or track, and he chose the latter,
“It was a fun deal,” he said. “They had some really good athletes. They’d never won a trophy in the history of the school in track. The first year we were second in the state and the next year we won it.”
During his second year in Parma, he assisted with the football and wrestling teams, which, along with the track team, all went undefeated.
During his three years in Parma, West married Jeanie, a longtime acquaintance from Idaho Falls, in 1962.
In 1968, with encouragement from a friend, West applied for the head football coaching job in Kenai, Alaska, which was trying to start a program to compete in the Anchorage league, he said.
He filled out the application and “forgot about it” until a telegram arrived, giving him 48 hours to decide whether to accept the job.
The Wests packed up and went. Kenai was an oil industry town and the local kids had never played football before, though a few had in grade school or junior high in the states.
“Everybody expected them to be a bunch of Eskimo kids, but there weren’t any,” he said. “They were all oil people.”
Though not expected to win, they ended up 6-2 the first year, “which totally shocked everybody,” and then lost just two the second year as well.
“I had gotten rid of a few kids because they were partying, which I didn’t much care for,” West said. He also took over the wrestling program, which was on the brink of extinction, he said.
But after two years, Sweet Home wrestling Coach Norm Davis, whom West had been friends with in Idaho, talked him into coming to Sweet Home. The Wests arrived in 1970.
West taught health and P.E. and took over the track and field program for 13 years, also assisting Davis with wrestling, during which time the Huskies won a state wrestling championship in 1976.
“Back in those days, if you got two or three wrestlers to state, that was about it,” he said. “We got five or seven, I believe. We won the state championship.”
He also coached cross-country for a couple of years, his girls winning the district championship and the boys placing second.
He also coached golf, a sport at which his own children, Peggy and Craig, excelled at Sweet Home High School.
Peggy, who graduated in 1989, competed in the state tournament three years and Craig, who graduated in 1991, made state all four years. Craig played with Joel Stock, another excellent local golfer.
“Both of them shot around par,” West said. “They’d alternate (in who shot the better score), it seems like, for quite a while. Even today, they’ll go play a tournament somewhere together, The last two they played together, they won. They’re still pretty good golfers.”
Peggy also was a top swimmer for the Huskies during a period when Sweet Home was rich in talented girl swimmers, including Leah Lamb, Kristi Peargin and Junia McKillop.
“She was part of a team that set an awful lot of records,” West said. “They and three or four other girls were pretty highly capable of doing things.”
After he retired in 1993, West continued helping Peargin with the swim program. He also used to enjoy hunting and fishing, he said, “and I’d still be doing that if it wasn’t for my health.”
Helping with the swim program is “the paycheck,” he said. “The way Doug coaches, it’s extremely important to the kids to get those splits, to know whether they’re improving or not.”
Peargin said the only thing slowing West down is that “his hands are hard to work now. In track, in the mile, he can get all 20 kids’ splits. When I get to the end of the (swim) meet, he writes it all down and gives me the splits for all the kids. I can tell a kid that ‘on the seventh lap, they beat you.’”
West said he can’t explain his success in coaching so many athletes in so many sports, many of them sports he hasn’t even competed in himself.
“I don’t really know, other than I just try to encourage them, not run them down,” he said. “I felt fortunate to get as much out of the kids as I did.
“I worked them enough that they got better whether they realized it or not. I tried to be fair with it. My one-on-one relationship sometimes has really been better with some than with others.”
Peargin called West “a tremendous technician.”
“He’s a funny guy,” Peargin said. “He’s a big old guy with a heart of gold. And the kids like him.
“He’s astonishing.”