Craig Jackson was combining a swimming scholarship in Texas with a mechanical engineering degree and several part-time jobs when one memorable fortnight helped to put the South African on an unexpected path.

Working as an assistant at the popular learn-to-swim program at Southern Methodist University, for which parents eager to enrol their kids would camp out overnight, he was tasked at the end of the summer to work one-on-one with a boy who had not progressed from the bottom level.

“I've ended up teaching him out of his grandmother’s backyard pool,’’ Jackson recalls. “His mum was working, so his final lesson was the first time she actually saw her kid swim, and she jumped into the pool, fully clothed, just so she could swim with him. 

“It was sort of a tipping point for me. It was one of those special moments that showed me it was worthwhile.’’

Now 57, Jackson would return to represent his homeland at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics once its apartheid exile - and thus his brief retirement - ended suddenly. By then, though, the 23-year-old butterfly specialist and freestyle relay swimmer was a little past what, in those days, was his prime.

Yet, out of the water, just three months working as a mechanical engineer would contrast with more than three decades as a coach, as a start-up program in Johannesburg that included zero clients on day one blossomed into a thriving business and national junior coach-of-the-year award in 2005.

It would continue with a move to join Ian Pope’s team at Melbourne Vicentre from mid-2008 on, initially, a two-year Australian adventure that became permanent, Jackson saying he learnt more in his first three months at MSAC than during the previous three years.

So is he an Aussie now? “I think I’ve been here long enough!’’

The man who guided Mack Horton to an historic 400m freestyle gold medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics is also Swimming Australia’s head MSAC/VIS Hub Coach - one lauded by the reigning 50m breaststroke world champion Sam Williamson as forward-thinking, modern and collaborative.

“Craig’s incredibly knowledgeable and well-rounded. He has the ability to take someone like me, who races for 26 seconds, and get them to a world championship gold medal, but he also has the ability to take someone like Mack to an Olympic gold medal in a 400 freestyle, an event that’s nearly four minutes long,’’ Williamson says.

“But he’s got (open water swimmer) Nick Sloman to world championship status, as well, in a two-hour race. So he’s not just limited by one stroke or by one distance. Craig’s incredibly capable when it comes to everything.’’

For the younger Tara Kinder, Jackson has the right balance of the personal and the professional, the calm and the passionate, is organised and methodical in his planning and enthusiastic in his love of colour-coded spreadsheets but also - with strong VIS support - heavily science-based.

“He has obviously been coaching for a very long time, both in South Africa and in Australia, and being an Olympic swimmer himself, he knows what we're doing,’’ she says.

“The sets he did in his day with a lot less physiological research than we have today were brutal. He was training in an outdoor pool with no heating. Like, he knows what we're going through, but worse. And then he did his college days over in the US. 

“So I really just trust him… he’s just sort of like my second dad. Without that sounding weird, because my dad is my dad!’’

Asked to describe his coaching philosophy, Jackson laughs that he challenges young coaches to develop one, but, ahem, can’t exactly remember his own.

Via a screenshot from his “coaching bible”, it’s later revealed as “clear communication, innovation/growth, knowledge, belief/confident”, from a coach who strives “to provide a safe and supportive environment with clearly communicated behaviours to drive behaviours that allow athletes to excel in and out of the pool”.

What he concedes are high standards and expectations means, for example, Jackson insists his 12 squad members - about half of whom are categorised - either get to training on time at 6am or text to advise of a delay. 

There is no such thing as a bad swim, only the kind from which nothing is learnt.

“Each athlete's very different,’’ says Jackson, who likes to plan ahead but remain flexible, and uses the analogy of a drive from Melbourne to Sydney.

“You know which route you're going to take and where you want to end up. But along the way if you want to take a trip into the Blue Mountains or something like that, you know you can do that. So it's always just a case of rerouting and coming back to that (destination).

"On the mental side of things, it depends on the athlete. And I think it takes a season or two to truly get to understand an athlete and figure out which buttons to push when they’re in the water and which buttons you should or shouldn't push when they're out of the water as well.’’

With Horton, Victoria’s only individual male Olympic swimming gold medallist, there was joint learning and bonding as 12-year-old Mack moved into the squad of newly-arrived Craig.

“I was very fortunate to have Ian Pope in the head role. At any point, he could have gone, ‘OK, Mack is in my group’. But he did allow me to grow with Mack and develop with him,’’ Jackson says. 

“And I think that was probably two-fold: one, Ian recognising that it was a good evolution for me and, two, I think Mack and I suited each other in terms of personality.

“I remember where I was trying to get him to do something and I said, ‘you don't want every day to be like Groundhog Day’, and Mack turned to me and he says, ‘but I like Groundhog Day!’.’’

Yet coaching was not so individually tailored back in Jackson’s era. Every session was identical. Every Monday night the same as the last and the next. Every week. Every year. And the year after that.

Groundhog? 

“It literally was… And the coaches in the US were just you worked as hard as you could all the time. And there wasn't a lot of technical feedback. 

“So there are a lot of things that I've drawn from that, but it's about evolving with the times because doing 80-100km weeks might work for one or two swimmers, but not for everybody.’’

Nor is too much emphasis on times and medals healthy, with Jackson and Horton speaking only once - a year or so out from the Games - about their gold medal ambitions. Instead, it was all about ticking the boxes that would put the great freestyler in the position to win the race of his life.

In Rio, he was as thrilled for Koti Ngawati to have qualified, given the year the medley swimmer had endured, as he was for Horton to stand on the podium.

Jackson: “As long as you've done the best job you can to get there, that's the most important part of the journey.''

Williamson is grateful that his coach eschews the one-size-fits-all model in favour of extracting the most from each individual: working out an athlete’s capabilities, then getting them past where they think they can go.

Humour is a key ingredient, as is Jackson’s ability to be level-headed, whatever the moment.

“At 6am at the end of a month-long training block, you don’t really want to be stepping onto pool deck, but he’s always there, he’s there first, he’s there smiling, he’s there greeting everybody, and he’s there picking everyone’s energy up,’’ Williamson says.

“But then when it comes time to do it, he’s also the one to bring everyone’s energy down so you’re not spending all your tickets too early.

“He knows when he needs to get in my face, and when he needs to fire me up, and he knows when to just leave me alone and when I need to get into my own head and be the one to pull the strings. He knows that about every single one of his athletes.

“Given my age as an athlete and the tenure I’ve had, he respects my decisions and he respects my feedback, and I’m never afraid to come to Craig with what could be a contentious or a really dicey opinion, because I know that whatever I bring to him he’s going to take on board. 

“He actively inspires all the athletes he works with to have their own voice. There’s not another coach I’d work with. Craig is the coach I’ll be working with through to LA and to the end of my career.’’

Yet Williamson does not believe Jackson gets “an ounce of the credit he deserves’’. 

Why?

“Because he coaches in Victoria. I think what he’s been able to achieve in the last 10 years as a coach and what he has been able to do in just a short time with a lot of Victorian athletes is incredible, and just because some of those athletes aren’t necessarily on the team breaking world records doesn’t mean what he’s been able to do hasn’t been impressive. 

“And I think that for far too long, swimming as a sport has viewed a world record or a gold medal as the only metric of success. Not something as ‘trivial’ as the happiness of an athlete, or what an athlete goes on to achieve after that career, or how far the athlete progresses through their career. 

“I think those should be metrics of success.’’

Jackson insists any differences between the states are simply a matter of scale and volume, with Queensland the location for the majority of programs and Dolphins. “But in terms of the facility we have access to, the staff that I've got, (the program) is one of the best in the country, if not the best, in terms of what we are able to offer.’’

Personally, he remains utterly invested, adamant it’s essential in a high performance environment to match the athletes’ commitment, while recalling another instructive moment in his early days coaching in one of South Africa’s few 25m indoor pools.

The facilities manager, a former rugby coach, was waiting to lock up after the session and declared himself amazed by what he had just witnessed.

“I'm like, ‘it's just a Friday night training session’,’’ Jackson recalls.

“And he says, "No, no, these guys are here on a Friday night, training. They could be out drinking, taking drugs, doing all sorts of things. You don't know what you've got in front of you’. 

“You do kind of lose perspective of the type of individuals that come through this sport.’’

Yet Jackson never takes for granted the thrill of a positive outcome or growth of an individual, regardless of talent, and recounts an experience in his first month on the job in Johannesburg with just a handful of PAYG swimmers. 

Including one in particular, who could pay (tick), but about whom multiple previous coaches had said Jackson would be wasting his time.

“He wasn't the most talented kid, but all he wanted to do was swim. His parents were well enough off that he was able to go to the US and swim there, but he never won a single medal the whole way through his career,’’ Jackson says now.

“The funny thing was that about a week or so into his training with me, he said, ‘we will be friends’. And I'm like, ‘no, we won’t. You're a swimmer, I'm a coach, that's not the way it works’.

“And every time I go back to South Africa now, I still catch up with him. And it’s just those relationships that make it all worthwhile.’’ 

https://vic.swimming.org.au/news-articles/craig-jackson-engineer-who-builds-champions