LaGarce remembered as mentor, teacher

Beloved Monett swim coach succumbs to cancer, community mourns
Charles LaGarce, IV, who coached the Monett Water Thrashers, the Monett High School’s boys and girls swim teams and the Monett Water Thrashers Y/USA Swim Team, died of cancer on Saturday, July 13. He was 59.
Began coaching in Ellisville
LaGarce was born in St. Louis on Feb. 22, 1965 and attended high school in Ellisville. His brother, Brad LaGarce, said he began swimming as a teen, and eventually became a swim coach.
“That’s just what he did his entire life, and he was a huge influence in the community in Ellisville as well,” Brad said.
While he was a coach in Ellisville, LaGarce was so popular, Brad said, that he (LaGarce) had to split up practices to work with all of the kids who wanted to learn from him.
“There were so many kids that, for swim practice, they had to break it up. Half the kids would swim … (and) half of the kids would run the fitness trail, and then they would switch after the practice.”
LaGarce attended college at Missouri State University (then Southwest Missouri State University), where he graduated from in 1988 with a degree in education and then began teaching elementary special education in Springfield. His father, Charles LaGarce, III, said he was a natural at teaching and mentoring children.
“I think he related to kids that way,” he said, “and he was receptive to them, and they were receptive to him. It was like a magnet. They all gathered around him and he treated each one as an individual. He loved them, and they loved him back.”
Move to fulltime coaching
In 1999, LaGarce and his family moved to Monett, and he began coaching the Monett Water Thrashers in the summers while commuting to Springfield during the school year. In 2013, he retired from teaching and began coaching full-time.
In April of this year, Ryan Goodson, one of the swimmers LaGarce coached, went to the YMCA National Swimming Competition in Greensboro, N.C. His daughter, Hayley Grace, said that was one of the high points of LaGarce’s career.
“He was over the moon,” she said. “That was on his bucket list of accomplishments of things he wanted to do.”
Interests outside of coaching
While LaGarce had a passion for swimming, Grace said, he was also an avid fly fisherman who actually tied his own fish flies.
“He loved going on the Roaring River,” she said. “He would go to other places, but Roaring River was mainly where he would go.”
Because he was so adept at fly fishing, Grace said, rainbow trout became a daily staple at dinner time.
“During the summer, when I was a kid, we would only eat trout,” she laughed. “It was like, horrible. I didn’t want to eat trout anymore. But he was just so good at catching them.”
Grace said that LaGarce possessed a lot of random knowledge, and often when watching a show like “Jeopardy,” he would know the answers to all of the questions.
“We always told him, ‘Why don’t you go on there and win some money?” she said. “But he didn’t care. He liked doing things for the love of doing things, rather than for any kind of gain. Like, he would mow so many people’s yards in the church, and my mom would get mad at him, because he would come home, and he’d get paid (with) a bean sandwich and a Dr. Pepper.”
However, Grace said, money simply wasn’t important to him.
“He just liked helping people,” she said. “It was purely altruistic for him. It was just about the act of helping someone else.”
LaGarce’s family held a private funeral for him, Grace said, because they were worried that so many people would come to the service that they would not be able to accommodate them all. However, the family also held a celebration of life for him at the Monett Casino Building on Sunday, July 21. An estimated 400 people attended.
Sometime in the future, LaGarce will be interred at the Spring River Cemetery in Verona.