'The Moments That Take Your Breath Away'
Remembering Coach John Manison
The Upper School remembers DA’s head swim coach, John Manison, who died in a car accident near his home in Raleigh in September 2025.
By Cana Yao ’26
Painted by the staircase of John Manison’s family home is the following quote: “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” As I spoke to his athletes, colleagues and friends in the wake of his tragic passing, I began to believe that no quote could more aptly describe Manison’s 32 years.
Coach Manison’s life was full of moments that took his breath away: getting up out of his wheelchair to walk across his high school’s graduation stage as a former paraplegic, fighting fires with a bulldozer in California, being cast in the third season of Glee, running alongside the pool as his swimmers made their first state championship cuts or set their first state records. Here at Durham Academy, he took a team that Athletic Director Andy Pogach had previously described as merely “surviving” post-pandemic and transformed it into one that could thrive. In one sense, the numbers speak for themselves — under his leadership, the men’s and women’s teams jumped from 12th and eighth in the state, respectively, to a remarkable fourth and fifth in just four short years. On the other hand, having had the privilege of being a swimmer of Coach Manison’s even for a short while in early high school, I can’t help but feel that the numbers don’t even begin to do him justice.
'You Had to be There'
“You had to be there,” says Atakan Sevik ’27, who joined the team the same year Manison did. But in case you weren’t, here’s a little bit about his life before he became the Coach Manison we knew. Manison was a multi-sport athlete who was suddenly stricken with a rare neurological disorder called transverse myelitis (TM) at age 16, paralyzing him from the waist down. Refusing to let his illness shatter his dream of lettering in a sport, he chose to swim for his high school team, where he and his coaches fought for his chance to compete. After years of physical therapy, Manison was able to regain full mobility, becoming one of the first fully recovered TM paraplegics. As Mia Selig ’28 — one of many former club athletes for whom Manison’s perseverance helped inspire a rediscovery of the joy of swimming — recalls: “Even if you’re not the fastest swimmer in the pool, you’re still doing something that’s making you happier, making you healthier.”
Manison dreamed of being an actor and moved to California after college, where he also discovered his love of coaching. His relentless efforts finally earned him a role in Glee — only to be hit with a transverse myelitis relapse that left him a quadraplegic for the first time. “Every time he relapsed, he had to start over again,” said Elly Sanger ’27, and that’s exactly what he did. After he was released from the show, Manison recovered yet again to pursue his career in acting, and he founded Sailfish Swim School in 2015. Then there was Apex Tutoring, which he started when he saw his swimmers struggling with online school during the COVID-19 pandemic. These two businesses were only two of many ways he was always looking out for the people he met: two boys who had recently lost their father and needed a “manny”; a young girl he met in TM rehab who needed a friend; his sister Jessey, for whom he once drove a donkey across the country in a Toyota.
'Everybody’s Best Friend'
He brought that love of life and of others that to DA in the fall of 2021. It was here at DA that he made his athletes laugh with his stories of jumping down a flight of stairs in a wheelchair as the high school class clown, Sevik recalls fondly. Where he became best friends with assistant coach and Preschool science teacher Dr. Theresa Shebalin, not hesitating to drive her son to get his blue belt in karate when she could not.
It was in North Carolina that he was baptized for the second time at the Passage Church, got engaged to his fiancée, Kayla, and founded yet another nonprofit with an admirable goal: STRIDE Aquatics, dedicated to promoting water safety through swim lessons for children who traditionally face barriers accessing them, whether due to financial challenges or disabilities. Where, as Manison’s father remembers, he set every password from 2024 onwards to include the phrase “StateChamps.”
The odds stacked against getting anywhere near that ambitious password were tremendous. The DA swim team was coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, where swimmers were training outdoors in winter, so “we were just excited to even have a team,” Pogach recalls. And swimming is DA’s only co-ed, middle and high school varsity sport that trains with no cuts, meaning that any given meet might see seventh graders competing for the first time alongside seniors who train year-round on club teams. “There were so many years where the club swimmers were literally over there,” Pogach told me, pointing to one corner of the room, “and the non-club swimmers were literally over here. … There was no attempt to bridge that gap. And he did such a great job of trying to connect … and that’s the definition of a coach, right?” Where another coach might have been daunted by these challenges and tried to take it slow, Manison handled them in the same way he faced his transverse myelitis and just about everything else in life: as an opportunity to build a unique, thriving team — starting not with state records but rather with spaghetti dinners.
Sevik looks back fondly on those moments — post-meet dinners, “Goofy Award” ceremonies, annual Christmas parties. “There would be times where we just went and got ice cream all together … just after practice, just randomly,” he said, even staying until 9 or 10 p.m. on a school night just to be around his teammates. That’s not what he expected when he joined as a seventh grader, intimidated by the team’s seniors who “made [him] look like a kindergartner.” But Manison introduced them to each other, he remembers, and they still talk to this day. “That’s what he changed: He forced us to become a family, but it didn’t feel like he was forcing us. It felt like we wanted to be one, but we just couldn’t before he came.”
And, as Selig described, every part of that family mattered. “It didn’t matter your swim level or your age or anything … he just loved everyone so much and so equally that you wanted to be a part of the team, not just because you loved swimming but because you loved the atmosphere that you were in.” The impact that this mentality had on her was tremendous, as someone who was two seconds off of the state championships cut in the 50-meter freestyle coming into the season. With her two best friends having qualified for the state meet, Selig wanted to as well, and Manison helped make it happen. For the two weeks before her last chance to qualify, Selig said, “Manison worked directly with me in improving my race,” giving her specialized exercises and working on her taper. She recalls the thrill of finally making the cut by just 0.01 seconds, and “although it didn't make it by much, I made it because of him.”
And he made it a point to engage with the broader DA community, something that’s hard for a coach who doesn’t teach and lives an hour away. “You’re at a disadvantage,” Pogach said. “You don’t know our community, you don’t know our schedule, you can’t just find our athletes at lunch, you can’t check in … but he changed that.” Whether he was offering to drive buses for other sports teams, getting involved with DA Summer, or inviting Head of School Michael Ulku-Steiner to be a “coach for the day,” Manison just “wanted to be involved in everything Durham Academy,” Pogach said. Including, hilariously, when DA announced on social media that the school would create a football team, and Manison was the first to respond with his résumé. “I think we were both a little disappointed,” said Pogach, laughing, “when I had to tell him to look at the date of the announcement: April 1.” Ultimately, Pogach said Manison took “what could have been a very transactional partnership and made it into a transformational [one].”
And as intensely focused as Manison was on swimming, Sevik told me: “He’s almost never serious outside of the pool … no matter if you know him or not, in the first five minutes he’ll become one of your best friends in that room.” As Shebalin’s son, Stefan, said: “I think Coach Manison was everyone’s best friend.”
'We’re all going to be ‘Manisons''
This autumn, I joined many of Coach Manison’s “best friends” for his memorial service at the Upper School: a beautiful testament to just how much Manison loved and was loved by others. For one sunlit Saturday afternoon, I watched K Commons fill with posterboards of old photos, NASCAR jackets, trophies and even his wheelchair. Sitting in the audience of Kenan Auditorium, I found my breath taken away amid laughter, tears and story after story from family, friends, colleagues and athletes; and the strikingly apt musical selection, “Wonderful Life.” I listened to Manison’s mother, Shelly, as she said the words that will stick with me forever: “Don’t you dare get back in that pool and say you’re doing this for Coach Manison.” Instead, she encouraged the team to swim for each other, to pick each other up after every setback just like Coach Manison taught us. “That’s how you honor my son.”
“Recently I found myself saying that you don’t know how much a coach means to you until they’re gone,” Sanger said that Saturday. Later on, Sevik echoed that tremendous loss: “I was gonna basically grow up with him, and hoping he’d be at my graduation … but mine would’ve been really special because [we would have been on the team together] from start to finish.” Still, as Sanger put it: “Coach Mansion would want us to not look back at those ‘could’ve, would’ve, should’ves’ … but to STRIDE towards the next best thing.”
And so they did. Shebalin assumed the role of interim head coach with courage, sensitivity and grace. As Pogach said, it was clear Shebalin was “the right person to carry on his voice, and to lead in the way that he would want led.” Athletes pulled through the season together, with the kind of resilience and community that I know would have made Coach Manison proud — with school records on the scoreboards, more spaghetti dinners to come and with “Manison” on every swim cap. “Coach Manison treated every swimmer like they were his own kid,” Shebalin told me at the start of the season. “So we're all going to be ‘Manisons’ this swim season.”
Hearing from this year’s “Manisons,” I am reminded of an old email from Coach Manison that I think best embodies the legacy they so beautifully carry on. “There is a bond that develops as a High School Team that is unlike any other in existence,” he wrote, encouraging us to give the upcoming conference meet our all. “This is a team that I am proud to be a part of, and I want to see all of you lay it on the line tomorrow … I promise that moments like these will stay in your memory forever.”
Author’s note:
I began this piece not just as a writer but as a former swimmer of Coach Manison. (“Former” feels like the wrong word — as he wrote to me when I decided not to rejoin the team, “Once you are a swimmer of mine you always will be!!”) I hoped to share even just a little bit about what it’s like to be a swimmer of his: to have my life touched by someone so extraordinary. But the more I wrote and heard from his family, athletes and colleagues, I began to think it might just be impossible to do justice to a story even more remarkable than I’d originally thought. In these pages, at least, I’ve found my words fail me. Still, I hope this minuscule window into his life — incomplete as it may be — might bring you even a fraction of the light that Coach Mansion carried into every room, that I still hold onto each day as I try every day to live a little more like him. At the same time, Atakan’s right. You had to be there.
Special thanks to: Elly Sanger ’27, Atakan Sevik ’27, Mia Selig ’28, Athletic Director Andy Pogach and interim DA swim head coach Dr. Theresa Shebalin for sharing their time, vulnerability and genuine care in our interviews. To Upper School English teacher Dr. Anna Dowell for helping me find the courage to write this article, Joanna Yoon ’26 for her thoughtful and thorough editing, and The Green & White staff and Ms. Katherine Spruill, Upper School teacher and library assistant, for their support. To Ms. Kate Auger and the Durham Academy Marketing and Communications team for the opportunity to further develop this story with an even wider audience. To the Durham Academy swim team, Michael Ulku-Steiner, Matt Walton, and Jessey, Shelly, and John (Sr.) Manison for a beautiful memorial service and for sharing Coach Manison with all of us.
Editor’s note:
At the time of Manison’s death, he was unaware of some very happy news: His fiancée, Kayla Ward, was pregnant and would go on to deliver a happy, healthy baby girl nearly eight months after his passing. Manison’s can-do spirit and selflessness will live on in Juliet Kathleen Manison Ward.