David Silverman Remembers Larry Rogers: Beloved Swim and Water Polo Coach at Bellarmine

Former Navy Seal, Lieutenant Commander David Silverman swam and played water polo for Larry Rodgers at Bellarmine College Preparatory (1990 – 94). He also played water polo for Mike Schofield at The Naval Academy (1994-98).

In a heartfelt interview, Silverman—a nationally recognized leadership expert—talks about the man who he says “probably more than anyone made me who I am today.”

- I spoke with Randy Burgess…

Randy was my first water polo coach…

- He called Coach Rodgers “old school.” Dante Dettamanti called him a “tough love” coach. How do you respond to this description of your coach by his peers?

Those words are very applicable. In fact, if you go back and ask me what his coaching style was, I would say something similar—that he was “old school” or they don’t make them like him anymore.

To be more specific, Larry Rodgers believed deeply that if you created enough mental and physical pressure on someone—to the point of almost breaking—then they would come out a much tougher and more capable individual.  A person that is able to deal with any competition or life challenge.  

He set a very high standard in practice and held everybody—regardless of talent—to that standard. He was direct in letting you know when you were not meeting that standard, to the point where you would question why you wanted to play. It wasn’t about having fun, it was about meeting that standard.

When you got to the game, he was relatively mellow. So by game-time you would have already drilled thousands of hours and practiced at such a high intensity level that the game was easy by comparison. This made us incredibly resilient and tough as a team.

His coaching philosophy was do the basics perfect and be the best conditioned team in the pool.  Sort of reminds me of that scene in “Miracle” where [Herb Brooks says]: “I can’t guarantee that you will be the most talented team on the ice, but I guarantee that you will be the best conditioned team on the ice.” Larry always had us in top physical form and mentally ready for any challenge.

Bellarmine’s plays were relatively simple, sort of like John Wooden basketball. We’re just going to do A to B, B to C, C to D, and we’re going to do that perfectly over and over and over again until the competition blinks or makes a mistake. We didn’t spend a lot of time studying the opposition and scheming against them. His point was: We’re going to play our game at our pace and eventually that’s going to produce good results. If we lose, fine—as long as we met that standard [Rogers] was okay with that. In fact, the only times I saw him truly happy was when we lost, because he thought that was an awesome learning opportunity for the team.

To be fair, we didn’t lose a lot—at least for the four years I was there.

He was tough. He was very tough and incredibly direct. He was like a father-figure that you could never really make happy. He created this level of intensity and competitiveness that motivated and drove the team. It bonded us together. He was our common enemy and we had to find a way to make it through the next couple of hours of practice. You were doing that twice a day every day for four years.

- You have a different experience about what it means to be so well prepared that you are able to deal with any situation. You trained and operated as a Navy SEAL, one of the world’s elite combat forces.

My time at Bellarmine playing for Larry was a major reason that I went to The U.S. Naval Academy and ultimately became a Navy SEAL. I knew pretty early on that I wanted to become a SEAL. My father had served, as had most of the adult males in my extended family, so service was important to me. Secondly, I loved being part of a high performing team at Bellarmine and I wanted to continue that for as long as I could. I was never going to be able to play water polo professionally in Europe so joining the Navy and trying to become a Navy SEAL became my career goals.

Coming out of high school my thinking was: Try and go to Stanford and become an Olympian or go to the Naval Academy and try and become a Navy SEAL. I didn’t get into Stanford, so it felt like God was sending me a message.

As a member of the SEAL Teams, or any high-performing team, there are a couple of things you must consistently do well. First you must master the fundamentals. The reason that’s so important is because when you get into high stress situations, you don’t want to be thinking about basic tasks. You need to make the  things that are routine, routine. Commit the fundamentals to muscle memory, so they happen without thought.  We wanted our basic competencies to be subconscious.

That creates space mentally for you to assess and make decisions in moments when other people are thinking about the basics. This gives you a massive competitive edge. As a SEAL, our whole goal was to create chaos for our adversary, knowing that we had stronger fundamentals, and in chaotic situations we were going to have overwhelming advantages in speed and effectiveness.

Larry was big on this. His whole thing was: if you drop a ball in practice, you’re going to drop it in a game. If you drop it in a game, the opposition’s going to beat you. He hammered us on the basics of not dropping a pass. You would do hours and hours of drills every day, making sure that the basic skills of catch, pass and shoot were fundamental. We’d do counterattack drills repeatedly for thousands of hours—same thing. 

I think they changed the rules around how often you could practice based on Larry Rogers. We were working out six hours a day, every day.

Those fundamentals became critically important as you look to scale to more complex situations. But if you can’t do the basics, you have no business competing at a high level. That was the thesis.

The same thing was true in the SEAL Teams; you drilled endless hours on shoot, move and communicate, so when you got to a target, where chaos is king, you were able to assess, reorient and make a decision faster than the enemy. Those milliseconds in our case were the difference between life and death… and the appreciation for those fundamentals I got from Larry Rodgers.

- As both a water polo player and a Navy SEAL you are a member of elite fellowships—and both have their privileges due to a high barrier to entry. You and your Bellarmine water polo and swimming alumni are also part of a distinguished group, the products of Larry Rodgers’ unflinching approach to aquatics—training that was transformative and, in many cases, life-altering.

With water polo you’re not playing it for the fame and recognition. You’re doing it for the love of the game—and because of that you tend to have a tight group of teammates and a common community.

Secondly, water polo is hard. It’s one of the few fully anerobic sports. Meaning your body creates massive amounts of lactic acid that you have to sustain over long periods of time. You look at the other ones like wrestling, crew, boxing etc. They too tend to have tight nit communities.

You couple that with the fact that the population that competes at that level is relatively small as compared to football, basketball, or baseball so you’re dealing with a smaller segment that has a lot more interdependencies—which creates a unique, brotherhood type of experience.

What’s similar about the best polo coaches—Adam Krikorian, Mike Schofield, Randy Burgess, Larry Rogers etc.— is that they are masters at creating a culture of winning. The level of commitment and sacrifice, the suffering and mental toughness that it takes to consistently perform at the highest standards creates a culture of winning. That success and culture becomes its own gravitational force. You’re much more apt to subordinate yourself and your own personal interest to that of the team or the enterprise that you’re working for.

When you read books about other dynasties like Bill Belichick in New England, Nick Saban at Alabama, Coach K [Krzyzewski] at Duke, Coach Pop [Popovich] at San Antonio there are a lot of things that remind me of our experiences playing for Larry at Bellarmine.

Another interesting thing about Coach Rodgers was that he never cut anybody, at least not that I’m aware of. If you were willing to show up and put in the time and effort—give 100% every day—you could be a member of the team regardless of whether you were good or not. From our best players to those that never got to play in a meaningful game or swim in a meaningful race, everyone was treated and respected equally.

Take a guy like Chris Aguilera, when Chris was a senior in high school he was the number one goalie recruit in the country. He was also an amazing teammate and the nicest guy to someone who never [got in the water] over his four years at Bellarmine. The reality is we needed each other to survive practice every day and the bond that formed between us lasted far longer than our time in the pool and mattered more than who was playing or sitting on the bench. From first to last we were one, and that was special at Bellarmine.

It is similar to my experiences in the SEAL Teams. Once you get into your Troop you become part of brotherhood, a family where you would do anything for each other.

- In addition to his responsibilities as a coach for the water polo and swimming teams, Larry Rogers was also a history teacher at Bellarmine. Did he approach his instruction in the classroom the same way as his lessons on the pool deck?

I did not take his class. I was a teacher’s assistant for his class where we helped grad papers.

I went to great lengths to avoid him as a teacher. Look I’m getting six hours a day with this man, I don’t need a seventh.

His reputation was [that] he had very high standards and was intense in the classroom. I don’t think he was nearly as colorful in the classroom as he was on the pool deck, but he was known to maintain very high standards.

- What sort of success did you experience in your four years at Bellarmine?

We won CCS, Central Coast Section, swimming and water polo titles—all four years I was there.

For water polo there is an annual State invitational tournament, which is the quasi-national championship for water polo. We won it my freshman and sophomore years. I don’t remember where we placed junior and senior years, but we did not win it. That said, we were consistently one of the best water polo teams in Northern California.

For swimming we almost never lost; In fact, I don’t think we lost a dual meet let alone a section championship during my four years.

For water polo we might lose between one and five games a year but that’s out of a 30+ game schedule.

Me personally, I was one of three sophomores pulled up to varsity—it was a big honor. I started my junior and senior year and was a second team All-American [senior year]. I made the national youth team; I went to the Naval Academy and played varsity all four years.

- And you played for Mike Schofield at Navy…

I started playing water polo earlier than most under Coach Burgess—I started in sixth grade and played for him for three years. My dad was a naval aviator and when he retired, we moved from San Diego to the Bay Area a few days before school started. I was playing on the San Diego all-star team; we finished our tournament in Florida, and I flew to California and started the next day at Bellarmine. I had no idea what I was walking into. Randy was known to be old school and tough love as well, but by Larry’s standards he was a nice guy.

The main difference was that Randy can be very charming. He has an engaging personality and can toggle his personality on and off the pool deck. Coach Schofield was like Randy, tough on the pool deck but generally a great guy off it.  Larry was different. He was pretty intense 24-7. He didn’t have an off gear. He had a system. If you give me iron, with heat and pressure I’ll forge it into steel.

- Did he have any connection with the military?

I don’t think that he personally did. I think he went into coaching pretty soon after college. As a historian, he had a passion and respect for the military. He would often use historical analogies in his colorful language when he was screaming at you.

I remember once in practice—it was 1991 during [Operation] Desert Storm, when the US was carpet bombing the Republican National Guard in their trenches on the boarder of Kuwait. He came to practice smiling and said “Today, practice is going to be tough. You are going to know what it feels like to be an Iraqi in a trench going against the Americans.” I didn’t really understand the analogy other than practice was going to suck. The heater in our little outdoor pool was broken and so the water temp was probably in the 60’s - which did in fact suck.

I think he had a special appreciation for guys who served [in the military]. I think the fact that I went to Navy and served in the SEAL teams was a point of pride for Larry and helped create a relationship between us post my time playing for him. I respected Larry while I was at Bellarmine. I was captain of the water polo and swim teams my senior year. It was my job to be that interlocutor between Larry and the team and try to ease that pressure on the guys to make it more manageable.

There was a mutual respect there, and when I went to the military we always stayed in touch. I always made a point whenever I would come back and see my family to check in with Larry, see how he was doing. I was shocked to hear that he had passed. It took me completely by surprise.

- Given his age, it seems Coach Rogers’ passing was unexpected by so many measures. What is your reaction?

I’ve had to deal with loss a lot. I’ve been to more than 60 teammates funerals from the SEAL community over the last 20 years, so it’s not completely abnormal to get that call. But I was sitting in a meeting when I got a text from my best friend from Bellarmine, Matt Sitter, and initially I thought it was an April Fools joke.

I immediately emailed Luis Nicolao [to say] I’m hearing rumors that this is happening. He said yeah, it’s true.

I’m not going to lie; I started to get emotional and even cried. I realized I needed to immediately write down some of the key lessons I learned from this man—to capture them so I don’t lose them. I feel there were more conversations to have to unpack these critical leadership lessons that have had such a profound impact on my life.

He was the most impactful man in my life after my father; I am who I am today because of Larry Rodgers. When I think of freshman year at The Naval Academy and playing for Mike Schofield, dealing with drill instructors and going through SEAL training, where you’re being physically and mentally abused… I always had this quiet confidence that because I had survived Coach Rogers, I was going to be fine. Nothing I experienced in practice or training came close to the intensity of what I dealt with daily in high school.

It gave me this calm confidence that I had the ability to get through any scenario. In combat, the same thing; when you’re going out every night, engaging the enemy,  the stress and pressure is intense, the fact that I had that mental conditioning from my time at Bellarmine was instrumental in my preparedness to be a Navy SEAL operator. Without Larry Rogers I can’t imagine I would have had the same career.

- Is there one specific memory that you and your teammates that encapsulates what it was like to be a player for Coach Rodgers?

I’ll give you two; one’s thematic and one’s specific. The theme is important because it personifies who he was.

Larry Rogers was never satisfied with wins. After every single game, the first thing we did was debrief the game. Those sessions were always tough and extremely direct. We’d go back and watch the film and he’d hammer us about every little mistake we made. Other people [would say]: He should lighten up! You guys just won by 10 [goals].

His point was [that] at some point you’re going to get someone who’s as good as you and they’re going to beat you if you keep making these mistakes. That stuck with me because the best teams I’ve been a part of are capable of learning equally from their success as much as from their failures. Regardless of how much we won by it was never enough, everything was a learning opportunity. He never let us rest on success. He felt that led to complacency, and complacency led to the end of the dynasty.

We did the exact same thing after every operation, both training and combat, in the SEAL Teams. We would go into a room, take off our rank and go through everything that had happened and look for those circumstances where failure, luck or irregularities could be tweaked and improved upon to make us more effective. The thought was that in a different scenario, those lessons could be the difference between success and failure, life and death. We’d make sure to institutionalize those lessons and correct them for the next time. This culture of learning allowed us to sustained high degrees of performance for extended periods of time.

One specific example: late in the season of my junior year in high school and we were playing in the finals of one of the last tournaments before sectional championships. We were playing Live Oak High School who at the time was our main rival. By the early second quarter we were getting our asses kicked. Larry benched all the starters except for Chris Aguilera (our goalie) and me and he put in less experienced players. I’m pretty sure he just forgot to pull me out as well.

We finished the first half down by a lot having demonstrated no real ability to play with the other team. So at halftime he tells us that we have lost the game.  Then he says: “Now let’s see if we can at least play competitively in the second half. Over the next quarter we start to claw our way back into the game. With only a minute left in the fourth he calls time out. We are down by two and the other team has the ball.

As we approach the bench one of my teammates says that we have done well and that we can be proud, even if we lose. Larry then told him to shut up. “We are going to win this Mother F**ker” and proceeded to draw up a couple of plays. We ended up scoring a goal with time expiring to send us into overtime where we eventually won. It gives me chills to this day just thinking about his intensity, his confidence and our ability to channel his energy into a win. 

Never quit. Give everything you think you have. When you think you are finished, find another gear, and go harder. Master the fundamentals and the results will take care of themselves. They almost always did.

Larry Rodgers ultimate success is measured not in wins and losses but the 1,000’s of young men that he graduated into successful careers in life. I wish I had another chance to tell him thank you. That you mentally prepared me for the stresses of life and ultimately combat.

 For that I am eternally grateful. RIP Coach Rodgers.