MEDFORD GIRLS SWIM - Klinner dives into new challenge as girls swim coach

MEDFORD GIRLS SWIM

Just over a dozen years ago, Sam Klinner thought he’d be building his adult life in Anchorage, Alaska.

Things changed, however, as Klinner got his chiropractic career started and established in his hometown and now he’s giving back to his high school alma mater by taking on the challenge of being Medford’s new girls swim head coach.

Klinner, a 2002 graduate of Medford Area Senior High, was hired by the district for the coaching job in May. He said Tuesday his initial interest in coaching was to break in with the boys program, but he was steered toward the girls when Morgan Wilson stepped down in April after two years as the Raiders’ head coach and three as an assistant under then head coach Betsy Meinel.

“We’re going to give this a shot,” Klinner said.

Klinner and new assistant coach Oralee Dittrich will take over a program that has held fairly steady in recent years on participation numbers with rosters generally hanging in the mid to upper teens and has experienced steady success in the Great Northern Conference and beyond.

The Raiders have finished 6-1 and in second place behind powerhouse Rhinelander in the GNC the last three years and has had WIAA Division 2 state representation seven of the last eight years. The 2023 team was 8-1 overall.

As a high school student, swimming was Klinner’s main sport. He also played football and dabbled in golf for a year or two.

But he was drawn to swimming by its combination of team and individual aspects. He swam under head coaches Mike Giese and Rich Burghaus as a varsity swimmer.

“I think for me it was transformative,” Klinner said. “It really helped me get fit and lose weight. It gave me confidence. It was one of the few sports I was naturally good at so I kept with it. It’s kind of a team sport yet kind of an individual sport, so I felt a little more comfortable doing it because you had some individuality. If you were decent as an individual, you kind of shined, so to speak. Whereas with football, the whole team was pretty good as individuals. You had to really, really be awesome to get any sort of attention.”

After graduating from MASH, Klinner attended Michigan Tech with the intent to study marketing and business.

“After about a year, I switched to pre-med after getting injured snowboarding and transferred to UW-La Crosse because they had a better pre-med program at that time,” Klinner said. “I finished out at La Crosse in 2006. I worked for 3M in the Twin Cities for a short time until I realized that riding a desk wasn’t very much fun. That was enough motivation for me to consider going back to school. I started chiropractic school in the fall of 2007. I did that at Palmer College of Chiropractic in Iowa.

“I ended up doing an internship in Anchorage, Alaska and was planning on staying there until I got sucked back into the Medford vortex. It has a tricky way of bringing people back.”

For Klinner, that pull was the opportunity to work with Dr. Tom Tessendorf and eventually take over the business, which is now Borealis Wellness Clinic. Klinner returned to Medford in the fall of 2011 and the paperwork for the business change was completed the following spring.

Coincidentally, there are two head coaches working as chiropractors in the clinic as its newest addition, Jake Rhyner, is Medford’s new cross country coach. Klinner and Rhyner both graduated in 2002 and swam together with the Raiders. “That’s how we got to know each other back in the day,” Klinner said.

As a high school swimmer, the 100yard butterfly became Klinner’s primary event.

“That was a stroke I worked through the most and was decent, not awesome but decent at it,” Klinner said. “Good enough to compete every year and it was fun. Grueling but fun.”

One of Klinner’s goals is to find the right combination between grueling and fun for the program’s swimmers.

“There’s a couple schools of thought with swimming,” he said. “Obviously the structure in the past was always yardage based and really, really pushing them to their limits from an endurance standpoint. Swimming is 90% a speed sport. It’s not so much about endurance when you’re doing a 50- or 100-yard event so we’re going to try to push these girls a little more toward speed drills and lung endurance and technique versus insane yardage. Hopefully we can get a little bit more of a competitive team out of them and make them have a little bit more of fun. That’s kind of my focus this summer and into the fall.” Klinner said aquatics director Mandy Haenel has been a big help as he gets settled into the position and previous coaches have also provided input into things such as practice planning. “They’ve been really, really supportive so I definitely appreciate that,” he said. “We had a brief meeting with the seniors. We have five seniors this year who were kind of made unofficial team captains and I kinda told them, whether they like it or not, they’re going to have to lead the way a little bit. “When we start practices in August, we’re looking forward to seeing what these girls are made of,” Klinner added, saying the seniors also indicated to him they want team chemistry to be more of a team focus. “We’ll be working on technique and efficiency and all the fun stuff that goes into it and try to make it a little more fun for them.”

Haylee Emmerich of the Light Blue squad gets her team off to a good start by kicking in this goal in the opening moments of its game against the Orange team in 11U play Thursday.