HIGH ACHIEVERS: Gee-Gees swimming head coach Dave Heinbuch retires after extensive career

By Martin Cleary

For every beginning, there is an ending.

And for swimming head coach Dave Heinbuch, who has enjoyed life on the pool deck shaping the individual and team talents of his athletes for the past 47 years, that end-day has arrived.

After spending the past 11 seasons as head coach of the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees men’s and women’s swim program, he has eased into retirement from training and motivating his grateful athletes, working with his enthusiastic assistant coaches and travelling throughout Canada for a variety of challenging meets.

“It’s time,” Heinbuch, 70, said in a recent phone interview. “The energy required to be the head coach is a lot. I was slowing down. I still love swimming. But you can’t be a head coach if you can’t give 100 per cent.

“It’s the job. When you can’t make a full commitment, it’s time to move on. It’s exhausting.”

The job is pre-dawn practices and weekend meets, keeping track of 40 student-athletes in and out of the pool, administrative work and running summer camps to help with the annual budget.

But Heinbuch, who was a breaststroke swimmer for Canada at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympic Games, enjoyed every moment of coaching, starting with the University of Waterloo Warriors in 1978-79 and continuing with the Nepean-Kanata Barracudas Swim Club and the Gatineau Swim Club before joining the University of Ottawa program.

“It was a fantastic opportunity,” Heinbuch added about his decade-plus stay with the Gee-Gees and building a national top-10 program. “When I reflect on my career, it’s about the respect I have for the student-athletes. I have a lot of admiration for the swimmers. I have coached a lot of good swimmers.

“My goal was to leave the team in a better place and I did that. I feel good about that.”

Heinbuch and his coaching staff of Vince Sljuka, Ethan Rice and Megan Coutinho finished the 2024-25 season with an impressive fifth-place showing in the men’s team standings at the U Sports swimming championships. The small seven-athlete women’s team was 16th.

The Gee-Gees men’s and women’s teams both entered the U Sports national championships ranked No. 7 based on their regular season and conference meets.

Breaststroke swimmer Hugo Lemesle led the Gee-Gees at nationals with two gold and one silver medals in his specialty to lift his career medal total to six at five gold and one silver.

For the fifth time in its six years in the Quebec (RSEQ) conference, the Gee-Gees placed second in both the men’s and women’s team standings behind McGill University. Ottawa won 16 individual medals (four gold, eight silver and four bronze) as well as nine relay medals this season.

During his 11 years at Ottawa, Heinbuch has seen his swimmers win 40 medals at the U Sports nationals and 239 medals at the RSEQ championships.

The 2023 U Sports nationals were one of his highlights as the Gee-Gees were an impressive third in the men’s team standings with 795 points and finished ahead of McGill and the University of Toronto. Powerhouses University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary were one-two respectively at 1,158.5 points and 876 points.

“Everything came together as we beat McGill and Toronto. ‘It can be done’ is my philosophy,” continued Heinbuch, who thrived on “bringing the team side (of the sport) into an individual sport.”

During Heinbuch’s coaching career with the Gee-Gees, he has seen the program grow to 40 swimmers from 25, experienced his job becoming a full-time position and taken the program to varsity team status from a varsity club rating.

“We had really good swimmers when I arrived, but we weren’t a team,” he added. “But when the university hired a full-time head coach, we became a true varsity team.”

As head coach, Heinbuch loved the team aspect of the sport, instead of focusing on the top swimmers. Training all swimmers to be the best they can be to earn points for the team at all meets was his key goal.

During his coaching journey, a number of Gee-Gees swimmers rose to the top at the U Sports and RSEQ levels – Lemesle, Montana Champagne, Davide Casarin, Eryn Weldon and Lauren Shearer.

It was a logical step for Heinbuch to take the Gee-Gees’ head coaching job in 2013 as he was a big proponent of university swimming when he coached for 15 years at NKB (1990-2005).

“One of our goals (with the Barracudas) was to get swimmers to swim at the university level. A number went on to Canadian universities and the NCAA,” Heinbuch said. “I wanted the swimmers to enjoy their university careers.”

Heinbuch came to the Barracudas after an 11-year coaching career at the University of Waterloo, where he was the head coach from 1979-89.

The Kitchener, ON, native, who was an assistant coach in his first year when the Warriors won the 1979 CIS national championship, was twice named the Ontario conference coach of the year in 1983 and 1989 (women). He also was selected the Ontario coach of the year in 2018, the last year the Gee-Gees competed in the OUA.