Fort Worth’s swim scene wouldn’t be what it is today without this Hall of Famer
He was an NCAA swimming and diving coach for 38 years, and the permanent imprint Richard Sybesma made was both on the kids he coached in college, and the thousands of children he taught how to swim.
Sybesma was the NCAA swim coach who actually jumped in the pool to teach the life skill that still too often is reserved for those who come from some degree of privilege.
“I would get in the water with the kids and really teach them,” Sybesma said in a phone interview. “I got as much joy as seeing a kid swim across the pool for the first time as I did seeing a kid swim to the NCAA championships.
“Within our program, I probably taught over 15,000 kids how to swim in Fort Worth.”
Sybesma left a high school job, and accepted a paycut, to become the head coach of TCU’s swimming and diving program in 1979. He retired in June 2017.
Of all of the achievements he amassed in his near four-decade long career, it was his commitment to the sport itself, and teaching it to little kids, that is his life-defining legacy. The little kid will not remember who taught them how to swim, but their parents never forget.
On Thursday night, Sybesma was inducted into the school’s athletics hall of fame. He will be joined in a class along with men’s golfer Julien Brun; baseball players Matt Carpenter and Preston Morrison; track and field’s Charles Silmon, Glen Norris and Whitney Gipson; defensive back Jason Verrett; and head football coach Gary Patterson.
Patterson’s induction is the most noteworthy. It’s the surest sign the relationship between Patterson and the school has started to thaw after he “resigned” in the fall of 2021. Patterson’s tenure at TCU is the most significant of any coach there in the last 50 years, and he should he enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame in due time.
No coach at the school lasted longer than Sybesma, who, like Patterson, were products of a different era of NCAA athletics. Sybesma was the old-school non-revenue sports coach whose priority was not worrying about whether their contract would be renewed.
He came from a different era of expectations for a college Olympics sports coach, and created the time to dedicate to teaching a little kid how to swim. He still does.
What started about 40 years ago when a friend asked if Sybesma would teach their child how to swim blossomed into a second career.
At 72, Sybesma still holds camps and lessons with the Rainwater Foundation, which provides free swim lessons for kids who otherwise would not have access to the instruction. He has done that for the last 12 years.
While he longer gets in the pool with the kids to actually teach them, he overseas the program that has 14 instructors, five life guards, and a policeman. It runs for multiple sessions in the summer at Wilkerson-Greines Activity Center in south Fort Worth.
He is also a fierce advocate for public pools, and was one of the key figures in the city of Fort Worth’s efforts to restore, rather than close, the Forest Park Pool near the Fort Worth Zoo. The future of that pool had been in doubts for years, but it was saved and underwent a year long, $15 million restoration project. It reopened in May 2024.
Combine those efforts with his long resume at TCU, and his induction in the Texas Swimming and Diving Hall of Fame last year wasn’t complicated.
He swam at Texas Tech from 1971 to ‘75. Coached at Monahans, where his team won 3A state titles. Coached at TCU where despite challenges created by the reality that he had one of the smallest pools in major college swimming his team won conference championships, had an Olympian, individuals who reached the NCAA championships, and every now and then his program would pop SMU, Texas A&M, Oklahoma or some other “name.”
Even to this day, Sybesma gets a tad emotional when discussing his team’s win over Texas A&M in the late ‘80s. Or about the time when he was asked to run the Olympic torch in 2002 through TCU’s campus. Or when he was asked to coach the Nicaraguan swim team at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
If it had to do with swimming in Texas, Richard did all of it.
“I know at the end it was getting a little rougher and tougher for me. The stress on the (college) kids is so much different now,” said Sybesma, who lives in North Richland Hills with his wife, where they are close to the couple’s nine grandchildren. “What (current TCU swimming & diving coach James) Winchester has done with that program is phenomenal. I am so happy with what they are doing.
“I wanted to make sure we were successful in and out of the pool. That was very important to me. I know we were one of the minor Olympic sports, but I always wanted for TCU to get the best bang for its buck out of our program.”
By the time he retired, he had coached hundreds and hundreds of kids through college, and taught thousands of children how to swim to essentially “touch the wall’ on a Hall of Fame career, and legacy.
This story was originally published September 17, 2025 at 7:23 PM.
