Ed Gendreau
2020 Inducted into the New England LMSC Hall of Fame (Contributor)
Created the NELMSC Swim Time Tabulations page
2001-2003 Meet Director, Jenny Thompson Pool
1999-2003 Meet Director, Portsmouth Indoor Pool
1998 Created first-ever NE SCM All-Time Top Ten (from scratch, literally from paper)
1997-2005 Meet Director, NE SCM Championship
1997 September NEM News New England SCM Championship – New Championship Meet Feature: Workout Group Challenge
1993-2010 Head Coach, Great Bay Masters
USMS Records
Pool – 1 lifetime relay
USMS All-Star – 1 year long distance
USMS All-American
Pool – 9 individual, 12 relay
Long Distance – 2 individual, 1 relay
USMS Top Ten – 203 individual, 106 relay
Club: Great Bay Masters (GBM)
From his first practice in the early 90s, Ed Gendreau had a vision for Dover Masters that went beyond a small local Masters team. Around 1993, Ed took over as head coach and re-renamed Dover Masters, then a workout group of New England Masters Swim Club, to Great Bay Masters. He would remain head coach and visionary of Great Bay Masters until 2010.
Over the next several years the team expanded from the Dover Indoor & Outdoor Pool to include practices at Portsmouth Indoor Pool and the University of New Hampshire with the help of Greig Cronauer in Portsmouth and the Aquatics Department at UNH.
Ed’s leadership brought structure and rigor to the team resulting in strong attendance at practices. As the team grew more competitive, their presence at meets – both local and regional – saw phenomenal growth. By 2002, the GBM roster at the SCY Championship at Harvard was 90 swimmers deep and a force to be reckoned with!
Ed initiated and directed the first NE SCM Championship at Northeastern University in 1997, which was also the first “Workout Group” competition. The goal was to create relay activity and some “team” enthusiasm. Over the years, the now very popular SCM Championships (now hosted at Worcester Polytechnic Institute) were held at Northeastern University, Wheaton College, Bentley College, and Boston University, drawing up to 700 swimmers from all over the U.S. Ed also directed several local mini-meets each year under the GBM banner: LCM in the Summer at the Jenny Thompson Pool in Dover and SCM in the Fall at the Portsmouth High School Pool. GBM was also visible in large numbers at popular open water swims in the 1990s and early 2000s when open water swimming was only beginning to gain popularity in New England.
Around 2004, Ed led the effort to register Great Bay Masters as an official 501c(3) registered charitable organization, seceding from the oversight of New England Masters and changing from a NEM workout group to become an official USMS Masters Swim Club in its own right. Though the move was controversial, Ed persevered and successfully led the team through this important change in status. Ed became president of the newly formed organization and stayed in this role until 2010.
During this time, Ed began building a strong coaching staff. After having been a coach/swimmer for so many years, he began adding on-deck coaches to the UNH (Erika Cooper) and Portsmouth (Darren Johnson) pools to help carry the load. As these new coaches began to show success, Ed began focusing more on his swimming and eventually turned leadership of the team over to Crystie McGrail.
From USMS Age-Grading: An Idea Whose Time Has Come by Jim Thornton on the USMS Website (November 23, 2017)
“Ed Gendreau's age-rating system http://www.egswim.com/ne/, developed by another USMS swimmer and software whiz, is used by the New England LMSC. Not only has Gendreau kept his system updated on an annual basis, but anyone worldwide can use it gratis to calculate a rating for any official Masters Swimming event.
“Members of the New England LMSC get an additional perk: Gendreau automatically downloads every swimmer’s data from the ‘My Meet Results’ section of the USMS website and adds age ratings to all of these at once. New England swimmers can see at a glance not only their time changes across their swimming careers, but also their time-adjusted rating progression, too. There are a bunch of neat add-ons, too, including the ability to graph your swims by time and rating over the course of each season.
“For narcissistic stat geeks like me, Gendreau provides a treasure trove of data that’s unexpectedly eye-opening. I asked him if I could pay $15 via PayPal for him to run all my results at once, and he agreed. I won’t bore you with the complete inventory of all my races since Y2K, though feel free to contact me if you’d like to see these!”