By Kye Berger
The swimming pool can lead you to places you wouldn’t expect. It’s not Magic, it’s just darned good luck.
Laura Seibold-Caudill is the current co-head coach of Delta swimming and diving. Needing something to keep her busy, she took the job after retirement in 2014 following 33 years as the head coach of Ball State University women’s swimming and diving. She took the position at Delta Middle School first before moving over to the high school after two years.
“I do think she is one of a kind,” co-head coach Alison Jackson said.
But how did the Eagles get this good of a coach?
From her early childhood to now, Coach Laura (as she is known to her athletes) has had many interesting experiences and is proud to be where she is today.
Laura grew up in Okemos, Mich., and attended college at Michigan State University. Shortly after college she took her first job near her hometown, and this is where all of the “magic” started.
She was offered a job as a permanent substitute teacher at Everett High School in Lansing, Mich.
Taking up the post included being coach of several girls’ sports: basketball, track and field and swimming/diving.
She had three sisters on her track team. Their brother was Earvin Johnson, better known later as Magic Johnson, who went on to become an all-time great in the NBA. Earvin was a senior at Everett High School at the time.
“That year he (Magic Johnson) would come down and help me after every (girls’ basketball) game. He would come down and sit and talk to me and give me ideas,” Laura said. “That was the only year I coached basketball, but it was still really awesome.”
Laura created her own magic in the pool.
She was practically born into swimming. Her father and two uncles were national level swimmers at Michigan State College (now Michigan State University).
Her father, Jack Seibold, was a swimmer at Michigan State who specialized in breaststroke. He placed third in the nationals.
Laura ended up going to nationals many times. However unlike her father, Laura stood out in diving at Michigan State.
She ended up qualifying for the 1976 Olympic Trials in diving where she came up short and placed 13th.
Laura wasn’t so ready for her swimming/diving career to be over, so she competed for one more year in college. “It was fun, and it was very rewarding, absolutely,’ Laura said.
Michigan State isn’t just any college to Laura, it is a Seibold family tradition. She grew up near campus, going with her father to many sports events, and ended up following in her father’s footsteps swimming, diving and even coaching there for some time.
As a young girl Laura was frustrated there weren’t many high school sports opportunities for girls, and that’s why she started swimming for a club team. Little did she know at the time that was just the start for her.
She earned her degree for teaching physical education and history at Michigan State. Shortly afterward she earned her master’s in sports psychology and motor learning at the University of Virginia.
Laura coached swimming at Virginia for two years. But she ended up moving with her family to Muncie, Ind., where she coached at Ball State University for the next 33 years of her career.
Throughout those years her teams won nearly 300 meets and had approximately a 60% win rate. She mainly coached women, but also coached men’s swimming and diving for five seasons. She was a two-time Mid-American Conference Coach of the Year.
Over Laura’s Ball State coaching career she coached her team to MAC individual championships a total of 34 times.
Coaching this long in a sport that takes so much time didn’t come all that easy.
“They (swimmers) have a lot of expectations of themselves and their coaches which they should. So because of that, I put a lot of hours in, a lot,” Laura said. “The bad thing was that I was raising a family of four, and that was really hard. I made a lot of sacrifices. I lost time with my kids and my husband.”
Laura’s husband, father and mother all passed away within a two-year period in 2018 and 2019.
Now 71 years old, she has poured herself into her coaching. One of her passions is writing the team workouts.
“It’ll take me an hour or longer to write a workout,” Laura said. “There’s a rhyme to the reason for every single set that I write in a workout.”
Her selfless dedication is one of the traits that stands out to her swimmers and divers.
“She’s really inspired me to become a swim coach myself,” senior swimmer Eleanor Groves, a three-time state qualifier in the 100 free, and 50 free, two-times in the 200 free relay, and one-time qualifier in the 200 medley relay.
Coach Laura also has taught sophomore swimmer Alivia Jackson multiple life lessons, one seeming simple, but being a patient person.
Alivia, a two-time state qualifier in the 200 free, 500 free, 200 free relay and 400 free relay, talked about how she needs to be patient and trust the process, no matter how hard it can be at times.
“Even when I get tired or burnt out of it she just helps me keep going because the love always comes back,” Alivia said.
Laura is different from many coaches in a variety of ways, one being her outgoing and special personality. Laura can coach, inspire and joke with her players.
“She is very talkative, very social. You have to try to keep her on track a lot of times,” said senior swimmer Zach Baty, a three-time state qualifier in the 500 free, two-times in the 200 IM, and 200 free relay, and one-time in the 400 free relay, “She’s basically taught me everything I know for swimming and wants me to do everything right.”
She can get sidetracked, but when she is focused, she knows what she wants.
“When she is on track she is a really tough coach that wants you to do everything right and be as good as you can,” Baty said.
She wants the best for her athletes and will be tough when she has to be.
“She’s very tough on us. She makes her sets very hard, but she finds a way to make it fun for us while doing it,” Alivia said.
Laura has upheld and added to the championship culture of Delta’s swimming and diving. The girls just finished their third straight undefeated dual meet season, winning three sectionals in a row.
Before these three consecutive seasons it had been 24 years since a sectional win.
The boys won seven straight sectionals from 2015-2021.
Under Laura’s leadership the boys and girls have won 10 combined sectionals. She coached a two-time state champ, Brady Samuels, who is now one of the top swimmers in the Big Ten at Purdue University. She also coached Sam Bennett, who won two high school diving state championships and is currently a diver at Purdue.
One of her last goals as a coach is to hang up more of her swimmers’ state title banners above the pool.
“I have never had or seen a coach like her. One of the reasons I came to Delta from Yorktown was because I wanted to have her as a coach,” Groves said. “I believed that she would make me into a better person and a better swimmer.”
Laura has built a fun atmosphere for her swimmers, as the sport can be long and difficult, but she never fails to find a way to lighten the mood.
“She is always laughing and making us laugh while making jokes,” Alivia said.
After 51 years of coaching, Laura has built relationships and changed people’s lives by putting a little bit of her magic into their lives.
