After the resignation of Harvard women's swim coach Stephanie Walsh last year, members of the team gathered in their captain's dormitory room to discuss those qualities they felt important in their future coach. One former swimmer remembers several girls expressing interest in training under a male coach. They believed from their pre-collegiate experience, which consisted of all male coaching, they "could simply swim better for a man."

If this attitude is as commonly held as this incident indicates, can there really be a place for women on the coaching scene? Is there an inherent quality in a man that makes him more desirable and successful as a coach?

Many people believe so. "I really believe a man is better at getting that last ounce out of national swimmers," said one woman, responsible for the younger members of the team she co-coaches with her husband.

Swimming has traditionally been a man's world. A brief glance at the roster of the 147 teams attending senior national championships last year reveals not a single woman who holds the sole head coaching position for a club team. The number of participants, however, is roughly equivalent between the sexes.

Women currently within the coaching profession, such as Karen Moe Thorton, women's swim coach at the University of California at Berkeley, point to the fact that coaching opportunities for women really only opened up with the advent of scholarships at the collegiate level less than 15 years ago. Previously, Thornton believes a certain stigma was attached to the title "female athlete" and women were often channeled into instructor positions.

"Female swimmers at the age group and national level only have contact with male coaches," says Vicki Hays. Harvard women's swim coach. She stresses the need for women swimmers "to have role models to look at and think, 'she's nice, did well and is not receiving rewards for it.'"

But many women coaches feel the problem lies not in the lack of opportunities or role models but in the strange hours, mentally exhausting demands and high rate of divorce that appear inherent in the sport.

"It's impossible for family life and the divorce rate is incredible. The sport itself won't change. It's going to take a different type of woman to succeed," says Claudia Kolb-Thomas, who left the national championship Stanford team last year to devote more time to her family.

"We wanted to hire a woman, but there was not one qualified female with head coaching experience who applied," said Skip Kenney, men's swimming coach at Stanford, regarding the position left open by Kolb-Thomas.

Kenney believes one must go back to the club level to find the seeds of the current situation. "AAU coaches are hired by parents. Parents often feel their children are surrounded by female instructors and would like to have more male dominance in their child's life."

Diane Campbell, assistant coach at Ladora Oaks Aquatic Club, has only found Kenny's analysis too true. She remembers attending her first board meeting as head coach, only to hear the club president, in need of a meet director, ask for "either one man or two women."

The situation has a self-perpetuating appearance, when many collegiate male coaches cite the lack of AAU coaching experience as the reason for the women losing out on jobs.

One must look back to the early sixties and the coaching of Mary Kelly at the Vesper Boat Club to find a prestigious women's club coach at the national level. At that time, Kelly's all-female team captured the women's national championship in 1960-61 and the combined mens and womens title in 1966.

What is unique about Kelly girls is that last year's roster of Ivy League women coaches reads like a Who's Who of Vesper alumni. Kathy Laurel at Penn. Eve Atkinson at Yale, Janey Barkmen at Princeton, and Harvard's Walsh all swam under Kelly.

"No one was more amazed than I that so many went on to coach," says Kelly. Kelly disclaims any role in the outcome which she feels had to do more with "time and circumstance than anything else."