MANILA, Philippines – I was 11 the first time I men swim coach Bert Lozada. My mom had said that if I wanted to have swim lessons I go to this pool in Alabang. I went one afternoon and found a few kids. In fact, for my first lesson, I was his only student.

He was a terror, yelling instructions from the side of the pool like a drill sergeant. You’d know you weren’t hitting your strokes right because he’d prod you with the pole used to clean the pool. I was struggling with my back stroke and I could see him shouting from the sides, his ever famous, “Langoy!!! [Swim].”

I was so startled by my initial experience I didn’t come the next day. I was a kid and found it hard to comprehend something good coming out of learning how to swim. But I would eventually go back.

Years later, he would tell my mom that if I chose to have serious training, I was welcome to train under his son, my present coach, Anthony Lozada. I took the offer during my varsity years in college, and I never stopped since.

Last May 4, “Tito” Bert, as I called him, passed away from a lingering illness. When I got a text message that he had passed away, it was as if my world had crashed. He was like a father to me, truly a loved one. Actually everybody—his swimmers, coaches, friends—endearingly called him Tito, probably the only swim coach to be called such. That in itself is a legacy.

The most important lesson I learned from him was his heightened sense of optimism. You might be the slowest in the pool but he’d be relentless in pushing you to reach your potential. He made you feel special. “Anybody can swim. Keep your head up high for God has given you talent,” he would say. It was to me an act of kindness carved in a lot of his swimmers’ hearts, that transcended the sport.

One of his last moves coming out of retirement was to coach a team in the heart of Manila, in Pandacan. He saw the need to do something upon seeing the community there. But he did more than that. He rehabilitated a dilapidated swimming pool and gathered the children living in that area, around 400 of them, and started to teach them to swim, to keep them away from smoking, drugs and alcohol. That team would become an unbeatable swim club; more important perhaps, its members became scholars.

Tito Bert’s swim school has this tag, “Makers of champions.” And indeed he was a maker of champions; not everyone may have had medals or broken records, but each one became a champion in aspects of life, in one’s own way. Through swimming, he showed me the right way to live.