Your “identity”, how you see yourself and who you believe you are, is the ultimate driver of your actions.

We live in a world where so many think their identity is a collection of their immutable characteristics, or worse, the sum of their carnal desires. That is what leads to behavior that might appear to be completely inexplicable to us. It’s why people act like victims, even when they’re not, for instance.

It works as the inverse also.

A lot of people fall into the trap of creating their identity around what they do.

• “My career is my identity”,
• “I’m an entrepreneur”,
• “I’m a salesperson” or
• “I’m a swimming coach”

I don’t see myself that way.

Who am I?  Who is Jim Koehr, and what drives his actions?

First of all, I’m a “Koehr”.

I’m the product of my father, his strengths and his brilliance, his failures and his foibles, his relentless drive for excellence.  I’m the product of my mother; the youngest orphaned daughter of Italian immigrants raised in a company coal mining town.  And one day in the not-to-distance future, I will be the patriarch of a very large extended family that will only get larger.

I’m a Catholic.  It’s what allows me to make sense of the world I see around me: the truth, the beauty, the goodness, and the suffering.

I’m Colleen’s husband.

I’m a father.

I’m a leader.

I’m a mentor.

I’m an evangelist.

It’s these components of my identity that drive my actions as a Swimming Coach, not the other way around.  When I say swimming is not about swimming, I mean, swimming is not swimming – for me.

Ever since my 12th child, Connor, graduated from Seton, last year, I have found myself in a life transition.  I have longed-dreamed that around this point in my life, I would transition toward a life of ease.  My inclination toward entrepreneurship, my tolerance for very high levels of risk, and a lifetime of developing the talents that God has given me have allowed me to make a living without having any sort of formal job, especially a job working for someone else, but that path comes with a lot of adversity and failure that can be hard on a man.  Just ask my wife.

Wouldn’t it be great to spend the rest of my life in “HOG heaven”?  I sometimes dream of spending the rest of my life tracking civil war armies through Central Virginia, the Shenandoah and Cumberland Valleys, or the Tygart River Valley of West Virginia, feeling the rumble of an 850 lb. Harley Davidson StreetGlide Limited between my legs, and smoking cigars in my backpacking chair next to the ghosts of Confederate Generals while reading about their heroic exploits on the exact spots where they took place.

I am not there yet, even if I wanted to be, but Connor’s graduation has forced me to confront the question of where do I want to be when the times comes for my perpetual ride.

Believe it or not, I try to listen to myself when I talk to all of you. One of the things I say that I hear loudest is Pope Benedict’s admonition:

“The world offers you comfort.  But you were not made for comfort.  You were made for greatness.”

It resonates in my heart like the perfectly tuned A string on a Stradivarius violin producing its bright, smooth timbre at precisely 440 Hertz.  It rings true to me.

It makes my dream of living the later years of my life in ease feel selfish and unfulfilling.

While I certainly derive a joy beyond what most people can appreciate while sitting on top of a small rocky hill at the end of Cemetery Ridge in Adams County, Pennsylvania, I do not think a perpetual ride, serving only myself, could ever be the source of the perpetual happiness that I seek.

Because I believe, and must therefore try to live by, the words I have told all the souls that have passed on and off the Seton Swim Team over the past 26-years, my dream also sounds hypocritical.

Should my goal really be to live my life in perpetual comfort, serving only myself?

All this contemplation and prayer have led to a question that I have been asking myself for more than a year now.  It is also the question I most often get from others:

How long are you going to coach?

It is always the elephant in the room during events like the Seton Swim & Dive awards, so I think I’m finally ready to answer.

I have decided that there are one (1) of three (3) ways my time coaching at Seton will likely end:

1. I just get too old.

I am about to turn 63 years old, and I’m not in the best of shape, which I need to fix, but I don’t see myself getting “too old”, or otherwise physically unable, for quite a while.

2. Someone steps forward and decides that they are ready to take the lead.

That is the way I hope it ends.  If it ends that way, I promise you, I won’t disappear. Like Bill Dealey, I’ll stay close to guide, mentor, and help fix the things that get broken.

And the final way it could end is if

3. I ever get to the point where I feel like I care more about this program than the parents of the kids on the team or the school administration.

Because I care so deeply, it is easy to have that feeling every now and then, but so far, it has always been fleeting with me just being childish.  What I have seen this year, even more than previous years, is the full support of the school administration in letting me run, and the willingness of the Seton Swim & Dive community to engage, to take responsibility, and to lead.

This has inspired me to believe that I do not expect that level of support to wane any time soon.

As Coach Joe Hurley once put it so eloquently, we do not merely have Swim & Dive team here, we have a “community”.

I love being a part of this community, so, to answer the question very directly:

Since my role as a swimming coach at Seton aligns so well with what I see as my “identity”,

Since I believe that I was not made for comfort, and

Since I do not see any of those three ending scenarios happening anytime soon,

I think you can reasonably expect me to be on deck for quite a while longer.