It’s just before 6 a.m. on a weekday January morning, bleary-eyed teenagers stumble into the Sweet Home swimming pool facility where a clear-eyed older man with a sandpaper voice greets them heartily.
It’s another edition of the Sweet Home High School swim team’s morning lap swim and that’s Doug Peargin at the controls, as he has been for more than 35 years.
Peargin’s Huskies consistently win and have brought home six state championships, including one last year. They’ve finished in the top five in state 19 times.
He said he does it because he likes kids.
“If you don’t like them, it would be hard to spend that much time with them,” he observed.
In many ways, his teams are a reflection of himself €“ moderately talented but big on the performance end of things.
Peargin, 67, grew up on a cattle ranch at the base of Sequoia National Park in the central San Joaquin Valley in California. He graduated in 1960 from Sanger High School, in a rural area south of Fresno. He played football, wrestled and swam in high school, then decided to focus on swimming when he entered Fresno City College.
“I liked the other sports, but for my size I could see those boys playing football at the JC level and I knew I would get damaged,” he said. “My mom said, ‘Why don’t you stick to aquatics?'”
Peargin swam and played water polo at Fresno City College, where he was named a junior college All-American in the 100-yard butterfly in 1962. That paid off with a scholarship to Fresno State, where he competed for two years before graduating in 1965.
He finished eighth in the U.S. National Championships that year, clocking a lifetime best of 50.6 for the 100-yard butterfly in the Olympic trials.
“The top three went; I finished eighth,” he said.
“You know, I could walk under every one of those guys’ armpits,” Peargin said of his competition, adding jokingly, “That’s when I knew I was in the wrong sport again.”
In 1966 he took a job at Tracy High School, on the east end of the Bay Area, which was seeking to establish a swimming program in its brand new pool. He said he’d had a chance to coach at Redding, but it had a successful, established program.
He preferred to start at the bottom.
“I didn’t want to follow someone like John Wooden into a program,” he said, referring to the legendary UCLA basketball coach. “I took the Tracy job and started the program.”
Tracy had 2,200 students, but it was the smallest in a conference that included Stockton and Lodi, located in large populated agricultural communities.
Peargin stayed eight years in what, he said, turned out to be a tough conference. His teams did well, taking second in water polo in the state playoffs one year and winning division championships at both the JV and varsity level in swimming.
“It takes seven years to build a program and one year to ruin it,” he noted.
While he was going to school in Fresno, Peargin met Felix Wilkerson, who was teaching in the area at the time and was taking college summer school classes. Wilkerson ended up coaching basketball in Sweet Home in the 1970s and Peargin visited him a few times.
“I liked the area,” Peargin said. “I told him that if there ever was an opening in the area, to let me know.”
Wilkerson did and Peargin got hired in 1974 at Sweet Home High School, as aquatics director. He said he moved primarily because he was concerned about his children.
“Drugs were so bad around the Frisco area, I said for a kid to have a chance, I was going to have to get out of California.”
He and his wife Victoria, who were married 22 years ago after meeting when her young son Josh was in a beginning swimming class after he arrived in Sweet Home, have four other children €“ Samantha, Kristi, Jeff and Rick.
He served as full-time aquatics director for some 15 years, then half-time as a PE teacher and half-time as aquatics director, then as a PE teacher split between the high school and junior high as various budget cuts and administrative decisions changed his job description, finally retiring in 1998.
But he kept coaching swimming.
“I like the sport and I like the kids,” he said. “The neat thing about a sport is somebody comes out for it €“ not because they’re forced to. That leads to a better attitude.
“I’ve made a lot of friends. Kids call me. My former swimmers come down to swim meets once in a while just to watch. They say, ‘Man, do I miss this.’
“They didn’t when they were working hard €“ let me tell you that,” he added, grinning.
One of the reasons he was attracted to Sweet Home was because he enjoyed the outdoors, Peargin said.
As a boy he’d hunted deer, bear, pigs and birds on his parents’ ranch and it didn’t take him long to discover that Sweet Home offered plenty of opportunities. He also got heavily into bow hunting, something he’d started doing while in high school.
He joined a local archery club in Lebanon and started competing, though he continued to hunt.
“I got into competition a little bit just to stay sharp for hunting,” he said.
He was a six-time state champion in archery and once placed third at nationals.
“It’s like the Olympic Trials €“ one day you can beat me and the next day I might whip you,” he said. “One arrow went in, the other went out. If both had gone out, I’d be 30th. It’s that close.”
He was sponsored for seven years by Matthews Bows, but gave that up because the company wanted him to compete more.
“They wanted me to go out of state and I didn’t have time,” Peargin said. “Any competitions now I do just for fun. I’m not doing any major shoots.”
He said he likes the challenge of archery and practices shooting every day during the summer months.
“You’re not shooting from mountain to mountain like you are in rifle hunting,” he said. “I like rifle hunting but I enjoy the challenge of getting close enough. You have to be in your living room to get a kill when you’re bow hunting.”
He enjoys the outdoors and the “terrain” as a bowhunter.
“My dad used to say that a hunting trip is like a real good meal. If you happen to get an animal, that’s the dessert.”
Peargin, who had heart surgery a couple of years ago, exercises regularly at the gym along with his wife Victoria.
“The things I like are outdoor activities,” he said. “If you don’t stay in shape you can’t do them. I’m not in great shape, but I’m in better shape than a lot of guys, I think.”