Beaches Quicksilver Summer Swim Team

Dive into fall with Beaches Quicksilver Swimming! The energetic spirit of our swimmers and coaches create a wonderful atmosphere. We have programs for all levels of swimmers. See the well-organized schedule ready for you. Join our welcoming community and make a splash this season. Sign up now and be part of the team!

Dive into our vibrant year-round swim programming with energetic coaches and amazing teammates. Experienced coaches will help swimmers of all skill levels succeed. Join us as we transition from summer to fall training! Email us or visit the registration link to learn more.

Don't miss the chance to be coached by the best this fall. We are excited to support you on your journey and wish you the best of luck at the Champs! For more information and to get started, visit www.beachesquicksilver.com or reach out to Coach Mo via email ([email protected]).

Just thought I’d share this amazing Coach’s story…. Also a coach that Coach Jen swam for and learned a lot from!!

The best swim team in America trained in a ditch. Their coach could barely swim.
Puʻunene, Maui, 1937. Cane cutters earned about a dollar a day. The plantation had a pool, but it belonged to the whites-only club. Camp kids were let in once a year, for a meet. Afterward, the tank was drained and scrubbed.

So the kids swam in the irrigation ditch - three and a half feet of brown water, catfish, the occasional dead chicken from the fields. That was forbidden too. A camp policeman patrolled it on horseback with a whip, and he liked to wait beside the boys' clothes. So they stopped bringing clothes.

The science teacher at Puʻunene School watched all of it. Soichi Sakamoto, 31 years old, a Boy Scout leader whose own swimming barely went past treading water. "I knew nothing about the sport," he admitted.

He talked the plantation into letting him supervise the ditch. Then, in June 1937, he stood before his homeroom class with an outrageous offer. Train every day for three years. No smoking, no drinking, no quitting. And in three years, we go to the Olympics.

Their friends and teachers laughed at the kids who repeated it. Nearly 100 of them signed the pledge anyway.

He named it exactly what it was: the Three-Year Swim Club. Motto: Olympics first, Olympics always.

The ditch became a laboratory. He painted distance marks on its walls and made the kids sprint against the current, drift back, and sprint again - a method almost nobody in swimming was using yet. He never sat down at practice. He never wore a jacket in the cold, so his kids wouldn't feel it. He never charged a dime.

Two months in, at Honolulu's Natatorium, a skinny 16-year-old named Keo Nakama lined up against a US Olympian. And beat him.

In 1939, the ditch kids won the national team championship of the United States. They won it again in 1940. They won it again in 1941. Barefoot plantation kids in paper lei and the loudest aloha shirts on the mainland, leaving with the trophies.

The three years came due in 1940, and the kids had kept their side. Nakama was a national champion. Halo Hirose had held a world record at 15, the FIRST Japanese American ever to swim for the United States. The kids had not missed the deadline. The world had.

Tokyo surrendered the 1940 Games for its war in China. Helsinki inherited them. In December 1939, they were CANCELLED outright. Pearl Harbor erased the 1944 Games too.

The boys from the ditch went to war. Hirose volunteered the moment America would take a Japanese American, and the world-record holder carried a machine gun for the 442nd through the heaviest fighting in France. In November 1944, trench foot left him paralyzed from the hips down. Sakamoto stayed home, wrote his boys long letters, and trained whoever was left.

Count what the war took. Keo Nakama won 27 national championships and set a world record in the mile. His prime ran from 1940 to 1944, the exact years the world held no Olympics at all. The greatest swimmer Maui ever produced NEVER swam an Olympic race.

"Sakamoto had a championship team, you know," club member John Tsukano said. "And Hawaii would have dominated the Olympics."

The kids kept the three-year promise. The world cancelled the Olympics. Twice.

His swimmers remembered the medals less than the man. He drove the far-away kids home after practice and fed them dinner first. Everyone who grew up in the islands had one teacher like that. The one who stayed until the sun went down and never asked for anything back.

But here's what the war couldn't take. The Games returned in 1948. Bill Smith had lived two years in Sakamoto's own house, set seven world records in 1941 and 42, then waited seven years for the race. At Wembley Stadium, eleven years after the homeroom promise, Sakamoto watched from the stands as Smith won gold in the 400-meter freestyle, then anchored the relay for a second. Thelma Kalama, 17, another Sakamoto swimmer, won a third.

"To have Coach there watching me win that gold medal, I think, helped to fulfill his dreams as well as mine," Smith said.

And Nakama? He went to Ohio State, won everything in sight, and came home to teach school. The war never returned his Games. So in September 1961, at 41, he swam from Molokai to Oahu - fifteen and a half hours, cramps, man o' war stings - the first human being ever to cross the Kaiwi Channel. He finished at Hanauma Bay in the dark, with thousands waiting on the sand.

Bill Smith was one of them.

Sakamoto coached the University of Hawaii after the war, then the Hawaii Swim Club until he was 75. He died in 1997, at 91. Today the 50-meter pool in Wailuku carries his name, still open, still full of Maui kids. The Keo Nakama Invitational just ran for the 77th straight year. And across the road from the old Puʻunene School building, the ditch is still there.

A science teacher who could barely swim looked at a plantation ditch and saw a lane to the Olympics. Soichi Sakamoto asked children for three years. He gave them the rest of his life. Olympics first. Olympics always.

Kickboard battles and breaststroke drills!

The kids were ready to race on Saturday! Great win!

Parent relay vs coaches and junior coaches…. The parents took it out fast with legs one and 2. After the third leg it was a three way tie, and Coach Cass brought it home with the win!!! Congrats to our amazing families and swimmers at our first meet of the season💙💙💙💜💜💜

What do you do for lightning delays… read with Coach Cass and organize the ribbon labels.

Good luck Coach Cass! You are going to do amazing at the Ironman on Saturday !!!!!