'Fascinated' Essick Comes East To Fulfill an Old Ivy Dream

According to new Harvard swimming coach Ray Essick, the Ivy League has been on his mind for a long time. And his decision yesterday to accept Harvard's offer to head the Crimson swimming program is in a lot of ways a dream come true.

"As long as I've been a coach I've always been fascinated with the Ivy League," he said yesterday in a telephone interview from his office at Southern Illinois University. "I'm really excited by the quality of the swimmers that you have here."

Essick has been involved with college coaching for the last seven years, stringing together a 38-20 dual-meet record and capturing the Midwest Conference swimming title twice. His teams have done well in the NCAA championships, as well finishing 11th in both 1970-71 and 1971-72.

Essick's coaching credentials are solid. In seven years at Southern Illinois, he has produced 21 All-Americans. In 1971 he was selected as an assistant coach for the United States team at the Pan-American Games.

But at Southern Illinois he had run out of challenges. It had become time to move on, and when Don Gambril suddenly stepped down at Harvard to take the head coaching position at Alabama, Essick jumped at the chance to realize his old Ivy League dream.

Essick knows that he has a tough act to follow, but he is impressed with the job Gambril did in his two-year stint in Cambridge, and is anxious to get going. "I want to build on the program that Gambril started here," he said yesterday. "Don did a great job revitalizing the program at Harvard, and that makes the job even more desirable."

South Essex

While Essick's interest in Harvard starting rolling as soon as it became known that Gambril had headed South, it wasn't until he came to Cambridge to meet with the screening committee a couple weeks back that he really began to get excited about the Harvard job.

"When I met the two swimmers on the committee [co-captains Fred Mitchell and Phil Jonckheer] that really crystallized my ideas about coming here. It was then that I became excited about this position," he said.

Letters at U.I.

Essick is a 1955 graduate of the University of Illinois, and got his Master's degree there is 1958. While an undergraduate, Essick lettered in swimming and track. Before coming to SIU in 1966, Essick coached for a number of years at the high school level.