NEW PALESTINE — When he was just a 17-year old senior in the Dallas (Tex.) Independent School District, Steve Maxwell was asked — by his high school swim coach — if he wanted to help coach the Atwell Junior High team.
“I was going to make $22 a week. I was in heaven,” Maxwell recalled.
He took that job and a few others on the way to a 50-year coaching career. The last 19 seasons, Maxwell has been the head swimming coach at New Palestine High School. The 2018-19 season was his final one.
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“I thought 50 would be a good time to stop, but I don’t know what I’m going to do,” the 67-year old Maxwell said.
Jason Tillage, who swam for Maxwell at Warren Central and joined Maxwell’s staff both at Warren Central and New Palestine, will be the Dragons new head coach.
Maxwell has coached in Texas, California and, prior to leading the New Palestine program, had stops at Ben Davis, Warren Central and Butler University in Indiana.
He leaves coaching with an all-time record of 849-371, a .696 winning percentage. It includes 455 victories with the Dragons.
Everywhere Maxwell has gone he has been successful. He has had a winning record at every stop and recorded 224 wins at NCAA Division I Butler.
“Coaching and swimming have always been a passion,” Maxwell said. “I never thought it was a job, but it is. You spend a lot of hours at the pool and away from family.”
Swimming led him to a family. Then-New Castle High School swimming coach Jennifer Kelsik introduced Maxwell to his future wife, Janet. The Maxwells have two children, Spenser, a 2007 New Palestine grad and former Dragon basketball player, and Adrienne, a 2011 NPHS grad, who swam and played softball in high school. Janet has been a math teacher at New Castle for 33 years.
How it all began
Swimming wasn’t Maxwell’s first love. He said he went to high school thinking his future would be in baseball.
“My baseball coaches told me I was confused,” Maxwell quipped. “I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’”
Maxwell swam two years in college at the University of California-Berkeley, before finishing his studies at Cal State University-Chico, where he majored in journalism and public relations.
All the time while competing, he was coaching. He was a high school assistant for three years in Danville, California, before moving on to be a boys’ high school head coach at Red Bluff High School in Red Bluff, Calif.
In two years at Red Bluff, Maxwell’s teams went 36-10. He followed with jobs at San Ramon Valley High School, also in Danville, before heading back to Texas to be a high school assistant in Houston and then in Plano, Texas, just outside of Dallas.
By the early 1980’s, Maxwell was an experienced coach and he was looking to go where all ambitious swim coaches wanted to be.
Off to Indiana
The Indiana University Natatorium opened in 1982. It was the premier facility in the country and one of the best in the world.
Maxwell was coaching in Plano at the time when the Natatorium was being finished. He thought it would be a good idea to try to get closer to the swimming mecca.
“It was the Taj Mahal,” Maxwell said.
In 1985 he landed a job to coach the boys’ high school team at Ben Davis and he has been in Indiana ever since.
After three years at Ben Davis, Maxwell became the men’s and women’s head coach at Butler University, where he turned the Bulldogs from what he called “a good time” program to a well-respected, successful Division I outfit. He was at Butler for nine seasons before heading to Warren Central in 1997.
At the same time a swimming program was beginning at New Palestine.
Dan and Barb Snyder were coaching the New Palestine teams but training at Warren Central. They spearheaded the project to build the New Palestine Natatorium on school grounds but weren’t wanting to continue coaching. When the New Palestine pool opened in 2000, Maxwell was the new Dragons coach.
“I felt like I was led to this,” Maxwell said. “I have a real attachment to the facility. The pool feels like home. It’s quiet, pretty. I love this building.”
Making an impact
Maxwell has made quite an impact on many.
“He has been a great ambassador to the sport and community,” Tillage said of his mentor he will follow as the next coach of the Dragons.
“I came in here when coach (Jeff) Scripture got sick,” Tilllage recalled.
Scripture was the Dragons long-time diving coach. He passed away in 2015.
“Steve made that an easy transition for me,” Tillage said, noting he was coming in during difficult circumstances. “He helped ease the transition with the kids.”
New Palestine athletic director Al Cooper has seen Maxwell’s work from two different sides. He was a fellow coach with Maxwell when he was the Dragons’ head coach for both girls’ basketball and baseball. When Cooper took over for previous athletic director Mike Huey, nine years ago, the former AD gave him some great advice.
“The pool, that’s Steve’s baby,” Cooper said. “The best thing I can say is what Mike Huey told me. He said, ‘You need to stay out of Steve’s way. He knows his stuff when it comes to coaching swimming.’”
Cooper probably already knew that. As a fellow coach with Maxwell, he said the two were similar in coaching styles. He said they both took a very “seasoned approach.”
“His impact has been a legacy of professionalism,” Cooper said. “He’s a reason we hold the sectional here. We have a great facility, but he also has great organizational skills.”
Maxwell’s student-athletes have gone on to do well, too.
There’s an emphasis on the student part.
“He was a big influence in wanting me to succeed in school,” 2017 New Palestine grad Courtnee Coffman said. “He always told us grades before swimming. He was more concerned with how we were doing in school.”
Coffman learned a lot from Maxwell in the pool, too. She was a state qualifier as a Dragon and has gone on to have success at Franklin College, earning honorable mention All-America honors this past season.
“I didn’t like to be pushed,” Coffman said. “(Coach Maxwell) pushed me to the limit, but he does it in a way that makes you want to be pushed. I was always able to do more than I thought I could.”
Another smooth transition
“I’m amazed how seamless the transitions have gone and along the way the people I have worked with have seamlessly come and gone,” Maxwell said.
He is also amazed about how some of those that have gone away, have come back.
There was the record-setting swimmer at Butler, working to get a degree in Pharmacy. Maxwell heard from him last year for the first time in 18 years. The former Bulldog swimmer is now a professor of Economics at the University of South Carolina.
“I got a letter from a swimmer I coached in California 30 years ago,” Maxwell recalled. “He tracked me down to let me know he had become a doctor.”
Maxwell admitted he made quite a transition as a coach, too.
“When I started out I thought they best way was to train the hell out of the kids,” he said. “After I had my own children, I became a less aggressive coach and saw I could be just as successful as I was before.”
There’s been a lot of transition. Passing the head coaching title to Tillage is the final one.
“Everything has moved in this orderly fashion and that will be the next smooth transition,” Maxwell said.
