Coaches and Directors
Pete will be starting his 13th season as a boys head coach and his 4th as the Centennial Head Coach. “I love seeing hard work and dedication pay off at the end of the season with smiles and that look of accomplishment from the 1st year to the veteran swimmer,” says Coach Crawford. “I will always say, you give me 3 months of swimming 5 to 6 days a week, and I guarantee you will be in the best shape then you had ever been before.”
Pete may not have taken your typical way of becoming a swim coach as he didn’t swim in high school. Being from a small town in Wisconsin, his school didn’t offer swimming. So he competed in football, basketball, baseball, and track. But the love of water soon developed from life guarding and teaching swim lessons.
There happened to be people that he worked with who were on the swim team at the University of Wisconsin - Stout and encouraged him to give the swim team a try. It also helped that they were going to Fort Lauderdale, Florida for the winter training trip at the hall of fame pool. So he ended up competing both his sophomore and junior year in college on the team. After not being all that competitive his sophomore year, he was able to make consolation finals in the breaststroke at the conference Championship at the end of that season. Unfortunately Stout dropped the swim and dive program after his junior year.
But an opportunity came in the form of the local high school needing a boy’s swim coach. So Pete’s first coaching job was the Menomonie High School Boys Swim team. During his first season he was able to take 1 swimmer (200 and 500 free) and 1 diver to the state meet. Upon Graduating from Stout, Pete found his teaching job at Centennial High School, where he taught for 27 years. The past 9 years he has been at the Middle School teaching Technology Education or what we call STEM.
After 15 years of not coaching swimming, Pete accepted the assistant girls swim coaching job receiving valuable experience from an experienced coach Chip Fetcher. Every year the girls’ team improved until winning the Northwest Suburban Conference Championship from 2011-16 seasons and winning the Section 7AA Championship in 2015 and 16. During the past 10 years there have been 3 All-Americans swimmers and 1 in Diving.
Pete is married to his college sweetheart Terra, and they have 4 children. Olivia, Austin, Carter, and Blake. It is probably not a coincident that all the kids swam.
Kevin’s career in competitive swimming started in 1977 when he became a member of the Anoka, Blaine, Coon Rapids (ABC) Aquatic Club. Over the next 7 years, competitive swimming became one of the major focuses of his life while he swam with the Fridley Park Aquatic Club (FPA), the Roosevelt Junior High Swimming Team and the Blaine Senior High School Swimming Team. During his 3 years with the Blaine Senior High School Team, he qualified to swim at the Minnesota State High School League’s State Meet his Sophomore, Junior and Senior years.
Upon high school graduation, Kevin was recruited to become a member of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Swimming Team, where he competed at the NAIA level for three years. During his senior year of college, he became the head coach of the Stevens Point YMCA Swimming Team. Immediately following college, Kevin became the head coach of the Northdale Junior High School Girl’s Swimming team and the assistant coach of the Blaine Senior High School’s Boys Swimming Team for one year.
In 1990, Kevin was hired as a social studies teacher at Centennial Junior High School and the head coach of the Centennial Senior High School Girl’s Swimming Team. During the early 1990s he also put effort into creating the Centennial Area Tsunami (CAT) Swimming Club and a “proto” Centennial High School Boys Swimming Team which competed for one season before collapsing because of little district support. He retired from competitive swimming after the 1993-94 Girl’s High School season so that he could devote time to completing a graduate degree and raise a family.
Kevin came out of coaching retirement to help assist with the brand new Centennial High School Boys during its first season in 2013-14 and rejoined the team again as an assistant coach for the 2019-20 seasons.
