As this season’s state swim meet was ending, Gary Layne stepped outside to warm up the family van in
hopes of beating the traffic rush.
His son CJ had just wrapped up his last race and was preparing to head back home. His wife Carolyn, who
suggested he get to the van, waited on CJ before they could start their trip back to Bowling Green.
Carolyn and CJ walked outside, each with an award in their hands to the surprise of Gary.
“My son had gotten the swimmer of the meet award, so he came out with this trophy and she came out
holding this plaque and I’m like, ‘what are you guys doing?’” Gary said.
“Oh this is what happened when you were warming the van up,” Gary recalled his family saying.
Carolyn clutched Gary’s plaque for winning the Neil Skinner Award for the top boys coach of the year in
Ohio.
Gary, who would much rather talk about the people around him and those who made the award possible, said,
“that’s the perfect way I’d like to get an award.”
The recognition had been a long time coming for the swimming savant.
The long-time coach first fell in love with the sport as a youngster taking swim lessons at the YMCA in
Findlay. Loving the sport the way he did, Layne began to swim competitively.
“I wasn’t very good, I’ll admit that, but I really liked doing it,” he said, joking. “Well then when I
got around high school age, at that point there wasn’t any real direction in Findlay swimming and I
quit.
“I always regretted that, so I got into coaching because I wanted to make sure kids had an opportunity
that wanted to do it — not quit like I did.”
Rock Snow, the long-time swim coach at Findlay High School and of the Findlay Area Swim Team (FAST)
program, gave Layne his first opportunity.
In 1979, the same year the Bowling Green State University Student Recreation Center opened, Layne joined
Snow as an assistant at FHS and with the FAST program. Layne quite literally got his feet wet in Findlay
until a group of people in Bowling Green contacted him with an idea.
They wanted a BG swim program that went year-round, not limited to the summer. And they wanted Layne to
run it.
“The high school also said, yeah you can do our high school, so I was doing Bowling Green High School and
the swim club,” Layne said. “It’s just turned into what it is today, 37 years later.”
Snow’s tutelage ignited Layne’s reign.
“When they talked to me up here about starting a year -ound program, I felt very confident that I was
ready to do it.”
Layne ran the Bowling Green Swim Club until 1997 before taking a position at the recreation center. While
still working with the BGSC as an assistant, his wife Carolyn has since taken control of the feeder
program.
It is those 40 years of work that was really awarded at season’s end this year.
“The athletes, if they don’t want it, then its not going to happen. What I was awarded would never happen
if those athletes didn’t want that,” Layne said. “I like to think it wasn’t just me that was being
recognized. It’s the whole program, the whole situation. That’s more of what I consider that award to
be.
“It’s not a Gary Layne picture award.”
