Daemon Vargas welcomed into local coaching pool
- Klas Stolpe
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
New Glacier Swim Club head coach humbled by community
By Klas Stolpe
Juneau Independent
It is not every day that a job applicant travels to Juneau, experiences the area’s weather and still decides to move here. But new Glacier Swim Club head coach Daemon Vargas, 33, found something special in the climate.
“Honestly, I am just really excited to get to work here,” Vargas said. “It has been a very humbling experience moving to Alaska and just having this entire community be so nice. Everyone that I have met has been so forward and helpful, and just neighborly, that I felt comfortable right away. If I didn’t know better I would think I grew up here.”
Vargas replaces former head coach Scott Griffith, 53, who retired in August after 37 years of coaching — 21 of those with GSC. Vargas’ official first day was Nov. 1, and he has been around the Dimond Park Aquatic Center and Augustus Brown Pool every day.
“I came for the final phase of the interview at the end of August,” Vargas said. “Had a great time, they took me around, saw everything, and even got a nice sunny day to leave on and got all those postcard pictures on my way out. So really, as soon as I got here it just felt like home to me and I am leaning into that.”
Nothing has changed in the months since.
“The views are still beautiful, the postcard part is still there,” he said. “The only real shock is just the daylight window being so short. We go to practice and the sun’s up, and then within half an hour it is dark outside and it is considered daytime still.”
He was born Oct. 24, 1992, in Chicago to Rodolfo and Anne Vargas. The family moved to Seattle soon after for Rodolfo’s work at Amazon and then to Amazon’s distribution center in Fernley, Nevada.
“It made Juneau look like a big city,” Vargas said. “There wasn’t really anything for my mom to do there, but they had a community swimming pool and she decided there was enough local interest with kids, and took the summer program and turned it into a full-blown USA swim team, and we competed a lot. We went all over the Sierra Nevada and into California for most of the meets...Before that, she taught lessons when I was even younger and I’m pretty sure I got tossed in there instead of daycare.”
After five years in Nevada, the family moved to Wenatchee, Washington, where Vargas would spend his public middle and high school years. He swam for Barracuda Swimming (now Velocity Swimming) and Wenatchee High School. At age 13 he was teaching lessons as part of the local YMCA program and was a lifeguard.
“So I was instructing while I was swimming for a long time,” he said. “That’s when I really found out I liked teaching it and I was fairly good at it, and everyone else seemed to think so because they eventually gave me my own pre-comp program. I think I was 16 when I first started teaching a group of kids specifically how to race so that they could go join the swim team.”
After high school, Vargas took time away from the pool to recharge, but his passion brought him to California’s Sunnyvale Swim Club at age 21 to be an assistant under coach Bob Hill. He learned the business side of the sport and soon excelled to a coaching position at the Los Gatos Swim Club. After two seasons, the COVID pandemic forced a move back to Washington. Vargas stayed at his mother’s vacant house; she was coaching in California.
“I wasn’t doing enough during COVID as things started coming back online,” Vargas chuckled. “My mom called and said, ‘You can’t stay in my house anymore, come back to California and be a swim coach. We have a job for you.’ I hadn’t been getting the opportunities, but once I got back to California and started working for a big team again and got into it I knew I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.”
That big team was Quicksilver Swimming in the San Francisco South Bay Area. It had over 800 swimmers and 25 coaches.
“I spent my time with them working through the different age groups,” Vargas said. “I was getting my first real data-driven swimming experience, like really measuring and counting in a very precise and very exact way, kind of like being part of a machine. It was rather impersonal and what I didn’t like was that rather than board led it was a coach-led program…so the head coach was like the CEO and in a sense it was more like a business…From a business standpoint it had its ups and downs, but from a community standpoint it was lacking.”
Vargas had planned to stay five years with Quicksilver, but after two seasons — and with a third child on the way — he wanted to try to move up to a head coach position. Wife Polaris, 33, daughter River, 5, and son Nihilus, 3, will be joining Vargas in Juneau soon.
“I realized quickly that the South Bay Area is one of the few places you can move from that is more expensive than it is here,” he laughed. “It just worked out perfectly…Juneau was on my original short list of jobs…My immediate boss at Quicksilver said she had a cousin who had moved to Alaska and loved it, and she knew that my attitude was a smaller community kind of thing and it wouldn’t hurt to apply."
"When I came here in August I kind of thought it was the final phase of the interview process, that I was being seriously considered…By the end of the first day here I met all the board members and everyone was just kind of acting like I already said yes. And I was like, ‘All right, that's a positive for me.’ When I had a beautiful day to leave on and I finally sat down with Julia (Frost, GSC president) and she was like, ‘Board meets on Wednesday, you'll see the offer Thursday.’ My dream job, really.”
Vargas noted the change from his last job to now being at GSC.
“It is honestly such a different perspective for me,” he said. “I came from a very large team that worked in a very compartmentalized, efficient fashion, with just a massive number of athletes and a lot of coaches as well. It felt like being part of a machine in a lot of senses and I come here and the community is — I just can’t keep coming back to that — but these kids specifically, it is like they have just excellent drive for the sport. At every single level, even the youngest and least experienced kids on this team are working hard in a way that I haven't seen in a while. And I don't mean that it is just old school training or anything like that. It is just that kind of commitment to the activity. I guess where I was before, swimming was something kids did alongside the five other after school things they do. And here, like you have got to commit to a sport because you can only really afford to travel for one if you have got to go all over the state and fly everywhere. And these kids know that they picked this sport and they respect that, they work for it and they love the sport.”
He also noted how welcoming former coach Scott Griffith has been.
“Oh yes definitely, I spent Thanksgiving at his house with his family,” Vargas said. “I had a great chance to talk with Scott. I'm super excited that he did want to hang around and keep teaching and being involved with the program. That community aspect has been the best thing for me, that people are still as involved as they are. And I gotta say the same thing of just the staff as a whole. One of the first things I did once I was here and officially working was I met with each of them individually, to just sit down and talk about the program and try to get to know it a little bit better and get to know them. We have an amazingly experienced and dedicated staff here of people who are doing absolute great work and I am so excited.”
Also exciting was his first trip as head coach to the November Rain Invitational in Petersburg Nov. 14-16.
“That was wonderful, man,” Vargas said. “I really enjoyed the place. Once again, it was another experience in a very welcoming community. The entire meet staff of people, I mean some I would not consider to be normally like involved roles, came up to say hi to me as the new coach, because they knew the old coach. The meet referee came right up to me and solved some problems I didn't even know I had yet with my entries and stuff like that. So I appreciate that kind of casual attitude…Everyone I ran into seemed to have a genuine interest in me as a person, and that's kind of not a thing you get in a big city.”
Vargas was also impressed by the GSC team at the meet. Of their 61 entries, 28 (46%) were personal best times. There were 17 first-place swims, 38 podium finishes and four season-best times.
“Even the youngest kids who were there knew what to do,” he said. “I mean, we coached for a large program that was race-focused down in California, but it still felt like pulling teeth sometimes to get young kids to remember the whistle cues, to remember the whole startup procedure for getting to the block, and all of the different jurisdictions and variations of where warmups are supposed to be. There are a lot of little rules that most kids probably don't think about most of the time, but these kids (GSC) were on top of that. Even down to the counting. The youngest kids knew how to count laps for the most part. Now they did it in teams, but like normally I wouldn't expect them to even think about that until they get to like 11 or 12 when they actually start swimming distance events. But we had 10-year-olds swim the five hundred free, and that was an excellent thing to watch.”
Vargas spoke to his coaching philosophy.
“I realize GSC’s importance to the community,” he said. “Even for a lot of people outside of the immediate swimming sphere…I feel like I'm still learning a lot. This opportunity specifically is a good opportunity for me to grow and as I was getting my head around this role, I really decided the attitude I was going to have was just find out how I can do it better on a daily basis. Just find a better way every single day. It's just like the constant improvement, it's kind of a reflection of my attitude as an athlete because I was never one who was upset that I wasn't making cuts or anything. I was just like, ‘I’m just working towards that next goal and the next one.’ I guess when you truly think of yourself as an athlete, you understand that it is about just getting better. Not about being the best, but getting better even then. You become the best and you're still trying to beat yourself at the end of the day. And so as a coach, I was kind of the same mindset. I want to do this in the best and most efficient way possible, and to me that kind of starts at the athlete and works backwards."
"We do coach an entire group at once, but the coaching has to be directed at each athlete individually, and so you get better by examining the athletes, seeing how they do, imagining where they can go, and then trying things out. And my favorite part of the job is that process. Just seeing how it plays out every time, because it's always interesting, it's always a different case. No two athletes are the same.”
• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stolpe@gmail.com.
