Imagine being part of the swim team one day, only to lose your program, your teammates, and your coach the next. That’s exactly what happened to Knox student-athletes. Since fall 2023, Knox College has faced problems with its pool. Staff observed several structural issues that could be dangerous for the students swimming there, which, later that year, caused the closure of the pool for an indefinite time period.
As a result of that closure, approximately a dozen students who had been members of the swimming and water polo teams had no place on campus to resume their team activities.
Former Athletic Director Corey Goff had a meeting with the student-athletes and members of the water polo club, where he announced that these students could swim and compete independently in the City of Galesburg’s Hawthorne Pool at no cost.
Following these measures, an email sent to the entire Knox community by President Andrew McGadney stated that “Students wishing to compete independently [were] offered full support by the Athletics department.”
Senior Rachel Schonfeld, a former member of the swim team and current captain of the water polo team, did not feel like the school’s support was enough. No transportation was made available for students to reach Hawthorne, and if former swim team members wanted to practice, that was to be done without a coach or formal supervisor.
“[Goff] was like, […] you could go to swim meets as an individual, but you wouldn’t have the team behind you,” Schonfeld said. “I don’t think anyone took up on his offer […] I mean, I understand the drive for it, but the whole reason that I think most of us were there was for the team aspect of it. I don’t know, I feel like the athletic department made a lot of promises to us, and it fell through. We couldn’t even rent a car to do water polo practice at the Hawthorne pool. We had to use someone’s personal car.”
Sophomore Lucia Ramirez, ex-member of the swim team and current member of the water polo team, was very upset with the pool’s closing, and even considered changing schools because of it.
“I’m really disappointed because I haven’t swam since middle school. Because during COVID, […] I couldn’t swim either. […] And for that reason, I was also thinking about transferring. I just wanted the chance to compete one more time. Cause I do miss it,” Ramirez said.
The pool’s closure also surprised and disappointed Schonfeld.
“I was really surprised. Cause we knew that paint was like falling from the ceiling into the pool and we could see that it was in disrepair, but we didn’t know that it was genuinely unsafe,” Schonfeld said. “I think part of the hard thing with losing the pool was that’s where we knew J-Pow.”
Jonathan Powers was head coach of the Knox College swimming teams from 2009 to 2022. He was affectionately known as “J-Pow” because typing that into an email would automatically fill in his full Knox email address.
When Powers passed away in 2022, money came out of his will into new blocks for Knox College’s pool. The pool area also has a whiteboard on which Powers used to write all his sets. That whiteboard contains the last set Powers ever wrote.
Schofield said that the blocks and the whiteboard became memorials to the students who knew Powers.
“So there were, in the pool, those memorials to him, which were really, really important to the people that knew him on the swim team, including myself,” Schonfeld said.
While Powers does have a memorial tree on campus, Schonfeld feels it only recognizes him as an economics professor. In another meeting, this time with President McGadney, she proposed retrieving the blocks and whiteboard from the pool to create a memorial for Powers. As her senior class is the last to have known Powers in person, she fears that, after her graduation, people will no longer remember him as Knox College’s head swimming coach.
“I was just super frustrated and really angry and sad. […] I was like, is there a way that you could have people go into the pool […] even though it’s unsafe, and retrieve those items and like, put them somewhere, somewhere on display for the students to know him?” Schonfeld said.
The athletics department has not yet answered Schonfeld’s request definitely. Schonfeld expressed her frustration with this lack of response and the lack of measures to reopen the pool.
“I don’t think the school gives a f— about J-Pow to be so real,” Schonfeld said. “They also didn’t give a f— about the swim team.”
In the email sent by McGadney, it is mentioned that the only way to resume Knox’s natatorium competitive program would be by building an entirely new pool. That is estimated to cost between 15 million to 20 million dollars.
Schonfeld pointed out that such an amount is generally only feasible through a donation made by an alumni. Since alumni typically donate to programs they participated in in the past, she worries that no alumni from the swimming team is capable of giving such a grant.
“I don’t know that there are any, like, swim alumni that I know that just have a spare 20 million dollars,” Schonfeld said. “Also because since [Powers had] been coaching since the early 2010s, most of us are in their late 30s. […] The youngest, me, would be in our early 20s. Like, there’s no way that we’re gonna pull 20 million dollars out of our pockets.”
Because of these circumstances, it appears that everything related to the pool—from the space to the swimming program, to the memory of a beloved swimming coach, is on the pathway of falling into forgetfulness.
