The American Swimming Coaches Association (ASCA) announced Wednesday its three Hall of Fame inductees for the Class of 2022.
Former Johnston Memorial YMCA head coach Franke Bell, University of Georgia program coordinator Harvey Humphries, and former Rutgers and USA National Team coach Chuck Warner will join 116 accomplished coaches in the ASCA Hall of Fame during a ceremony set for September 8 in Las Vegas.
One of the first female head swimming coaches in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the late 1950s, Bell used creative methods to mold future champions. She studied the bottoms of ships to learn about reducing resistance and hand-crafted paddles out of plexiglass to help her swimmers. Bell was also one of the first coaches to incorporate dry-land training. Among her notable students is SwimSwam co-founder Mel Stewart, who won two gold medals at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. Bell turned down several international coaching offers, including one to be the first American female head coach for the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Humphries helped Georgia’s swimming program transform into a national powerhouse. Since 1989, the Bulldogs have won 22 NCAA and 57 SEC titles in the 500 and 1,650 freestyle and the 400 individual medley under Humphries. He has coached numerous Olympians and served for National Junior Teams and USS select camps. A Georgia Senior Coach of the Year, he was inducted into the Arkansas Swimming Hall of Fame in 2003. For nearly 40 years, Humphries has also been the head coach of the Athens Bulldog Swim Club (ABSC).
In more than 40 years of coaching swimming, Warner’s teams have won seven national YMCA championships and been NCAA Division II runners-up three times. He has also been named a USA National Team coach on three occasions and earned the Big East Coach of the Year honor three times. Recently, Warner has shifted his focus to writing, authoring three books about great swimmers and coaches through history. They include “Four Champions, One Gold” about the training and race for the 1500-meter gold medal in the 1976 Olympics, “…And Then They Won Gold: Stepping Stones to Swimming Excellence,” and “Eddie Reese: Coaching Swimming, Teaching Life.”
The induction celebration will take place at the Westgate Resort during the 2022 ASCA World Clinics Award Banquet this fall.