Swimmer, coach with Down syndrome build a bond

The intro to a feature story in the NY Daily News about Noah Rinehart and his swim coach, Michael Plappert. Both are pictured.

DOVER, Pa. - As dusk slips over the frozen hillsides of south central Pennsylvania, just northeast of Gettysburg, a red-haired swim coach named Michael Plappert is at water's edge in a steamy aquatic center, offering some final advice to his pupil and protégé. "Do your best. Don't look around. Swim down and back as fast as you can," the coach says.

In Lane 6, lying on his back as he awaits the start of the 50-yard freestyle in a meet between Dover Area High School and Northeastern High, Noah Rinehart, a 16-year-old Dover sophomore, seems to be taking it in. For once he is not making wisecracks, or flirting with the girls. He loves being in the water, on a team, and being around Michael Plappert, a decorated athlete and 26-year-old assistant coach for the Dover High Eagles who doubles as his best friend.

"He's my inspiration, and my goal to keep going," Noah says. "He's my role model."

There are tens of thousands of coach/athlete relationships in this country, at all levels, in all sports. None of them is quite like the connection shared by Michael Plappert and Noah Rinehart, who live five miles apart in this town of 2,000, Rinehart in a barrier-free addition to a 200-year-old stone farmhouse on the side of a hill, Plappert in a snug, sand-colored ranch house in a subdivision. Rinehart is a husky, gregarious sort with wispy, wayward hair, and a penchant for joking. He is ready to answer any question, at any time.

"Ask away," he says in his wheelchair, attempting to drum his fingers for dramatic affect. Plappert, by contrast, is reserved and calm, a man who is immaculately groomed and spare with his words. Plappert swam four years for the Dover varsity, and has been an assistant to head coach Rich Janosky ever since. In the nine years he has worked at Weis supermarket, Plappert's quiet eagerness, sunny attitude and complete dependability have made him as valued as a $7.75-an-hour bagger can be.

"He's a real asset to the company," store manager Scott Gladfelter says.

For Michael Plappert and Noah Rinehart, though, their commonality overrides all of their differences. That's how it is when you are a person with Down syndrome, a genetic variance that occurs in one of every 733 births in this country, one that has profound implications for the families involved and has forged a powerful poolside bond between an earnest coach and a free-spirited swimmer.

"These are guys who understand each other," Janosky says.

Around the globe next month, World Down Syndrome Day will be observed, the date, March 21, tied to hard science; Down syndrome traces to the presence of a third copy of the 21st chromosome in every cell in the body. In Dover, the day will be commemorated without fanfare by Rinehart and Plappert, who will rather do what they do everyday, redefining the limits of what people might believe is possible.

Bill Plappert is Michael's father, a retired math teacher who is still galled by their pediatrician's abject gloom after Michael was born, telling the family that Michael someday may learn to perform a few repetitive functions, and nothing more.

It's not that Bill and Karen Plappert were looking for candy-coated optimism. But did the doctor really need to discuss adoption? Did he need to tell the Plapperts their baby would not be much different from a brussel sprout on the chain of life?

"That's what spurred us on," Bill Plappert says. "This is our son. Don't say ahead of time that he can't do this and can't do that. The big word for us has always been opportunity. Give him a chance. As an educator, I know it's all about expectations. If you don't expect anything you won't get anything."