Winthrop Dyer
Winthrop Dyer is a native Hoosier, born in Bloomington, Indiana during the heyday of Indiana University’s swimming dominance under Doc Counsilman in the mid- and late 1960’s. His first coaches with Bloomington Swim Club were college students who happened to be swimmers, and Olympians. April and Elie Murray, Mark Spitz, Charlie Hickox and Chet "The Jet" Jastremski all helped mold Coach Dyer's early swimming career.
At Phillips Exeter, Dyer earned All-American awards in swimming and water polo under the instruction of coach Roger Nekton. While pursuing his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Winthrop was coached by Tim Welsh, who eventually went on to coach at Notre Dame. His senior year he was co-captain of both swimming and water polo and coached the water polo team to a Division II East Coast Championship with a record of 26-0. During that year Hopkins had a coaching change with first-year coach George Kennedy. The years at Johns Hopkins ended with 11 swimming All-American honors, three water polo and a trip to the 1984 Olympic Trials.
Graduate school took Coach Dyer back home to Bloomington to study with Doc Counsilman and Hobie Billingsly in their last years at Indiana. He again coached the water polo team as a graduate student, and after finishing his Master's degree in exercise physiology moved to Georgia to coach in Moultrie for the YMCA. The Moultrie YMCA, despite the small size of the town was home of Moss Farms divers and won 18 consecutive YMCA national diving championships and two YMCA state titles.
During his time in Colorado, Winthrop has coached at Douglas County and Heritage High Schools, Cherry Hills and Glenmoor Country Clubs and was the head swimming and diving coach at Metropolitan State College in Denver from 2005-2007. Since 2003, he and his wife Melissa, who is the Aquatic Director at the Littleton YMCA have lived in Littleton, just off of Sterne park. In their all-too-infrequent free time Mel and Winthrop spend time on Cape Cod visiting Melissa's family, or head south to the Bahamas for some serious beach time.