At the pool with …: Jim Ellis: the legendary Philadelphia swim coach is the focus of the movie Pride

Jim Ellis kicks back poolside at the Marcus Foster Recreation Center in North Philadelphia, his eyes closed. For Ellis, this public, indoor pool is his paradise, brand the sound of the churning water, full of young people stroking, is his special brand of music.

"It's like listening to jazz," Ellis says. "I can sit herewith my eyes closed and see it funking out."

In the Ellis lexicon, the funk is excellence. The funk is fast. The funk is the challenge. "It's an aura. The funk is a tough, brazen attitude," says Jason Webb, a former Philadelphia Department of Recreation (PDR) swim team member and a nationally ranked backstroker. "The funk is Jim."

JIM ELLIS Continued

For more than 30 years, Ellis has coached his PDR team to national age-group championships, college scholarships and Olympic trials competition. He stands proudly as the model for inner-city swim teams in the United States. And now he has become the subject of a major motion picture, Pride, starring Academy Award-nominee Terrence Howard.

Ellis' reputation is one of a stern taskmaster and overall speedmaker. The word has been out for years: "If you want to swim fast, go to Jim Ellis."

That's not his ego talking. At a time when the idea of an African-American swimming competitively hadn't made a splash in anybody's mind, Ellis created a powerhouse with little more than a city pool and a determined dream. More than that, his unwavering commitment and dedication to his young charges stand as an uncomplicated lesson in mentorship and selfless devotion.

"Jim has all the ingredients to make people great," says Webb, 32, who first began swimming with Ellis at age 6. "People may quantify it in different ways: 'Jim helped that one make the national team, or that one go to college for free, or that one he got off the streets ... ' I'm a nurse at Albert Einstein Medical Center, in the trauma room. No, I'm not jumping in the water at 6 a.m. anymore, but I'm the man I am because of him."

In preparation for the movie role, Ellis says Howard hung out with the team for about a month. "He's a nice young man who's intense about his work," Ellis says of the versatile actor. "After about a month, he got in the pool and started swimming. He can swim ... , but he would need work if he wanted to swim with me."

The award-winning swim coach is quick to crack a joke, easy to smile. At 57, he's more mellow, grayer and thinner (he recently dropped 35 pounds after being diagnosed with diabetes) than he was when he was the Afro-wearing, dashiki-clad firebrand who chose swimming as his method of community activism back in 1971.

A high school math teacher by day, Ellis is coaching a second generation of swimmers now. In the water, working out with fins and paddles are Jessica, Madison and Taylor Freeland, whose father, Tracy, was the first African-American to make the Mid-Atlantic All-Star team as a 10-year-old specialist of the butterfly stroke. Today, Tracy Freeland, 39, serves as Ellis' assistant coach.

"Since I didn't grow up with a father, Jim's been like a dad to me. I've talked to him every day since I was 5 years old," Freeland says. "He's not willing to change his philosophy just to please people."

Ellis' vision was simple but unprecedented back in 1971--put together a city team that could compete. No one had ever done it before because the challenges seemed insurmountable. But Ellis refused to let the conventional thinking--that swimming just not a competitive sport for Blacks--dash his dream. He knew he could put together an all-Black team coached by a Black coach, because Black role models were all he had ever known. "I didn't want a supertalented Black kid to have to leave because we didn't have the resources to keep him here," Ellis says.

Ellis' father, James Sr., introduced his son to the water by throwing him off a boat into a lake when Ellis was about 6 years old. "Oh, heck yeah, I panicked," Ellis recalls. "But I took to it rather easily."

Ellis was a proficient freestyler at Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh in the early '60s. He also swam at Cheyney State University before the team disbanded during his sophomore year.

Still a student, Ellis took a job as a water safety instructor at Sayre Community Recreation Center in West Philadelphia. He would recruit by plucking broad-shouldered, long-limbed rejects from the group playing pickup basketball behind the recreation center. He would teach the little ones how to swim, and after they earned Red Cross pins, he'd have them race one another. Soon, they wanted to race the coach.

"After they'd get their certificates, they would disappear," he recalls. "I thought [racing] would be a way to keep them around. I thought it would be a natural way to take a community not historically interested in aquatics to get interested in aquatics."

Freeland and his brother, Trevor, made up that first team. While it was a source of pride for his all-Black squad to show up at meets and win them, Freeland still remembers the painful times. Once, he was turned away at the entrance to Kelly Pool, PDR's outdoor pool, during the spring season. "They told me I couldn't come in. I told them, 'But I'm in the meet,'" says Freeland, who went on to win a four-year swimming scholarship at Howard University.