re: Any news or rumors on a new swimming coach?

Chris Ip was only at LSU for a few months, while he found a fulltime job Brown HC)
Reports from around the country are that the LSU Tigers are pursuing assistants from some of the top collegiate programs in the country to fill their vacant head swimming & diving coaching position.

Without a strong base of alumni within the collegiate coaching ranks, like we’ve seen in other openings, like the one at conference rivals Auburn, the LSU job is a more wide-open proposition.

Among the names that have reportedly had conversations with the LSU athletics director about the job include Ohio State associate head coach Matt Bowe, University of Florida associate head coach Steve Jungbluth, and Indiana associate head coach Cory Chitwood.

Of that group, the one with the strongest LSU ties is Chitwood, who spent the 2012-2013 season as an assistant at LSU – his first full-time collegiate coaching job.

Current LSU athletics director Scott Woodward is an LSU alumnus, but was not at LSU during Chitwood’s prior stop there. At the time, he was serving as the athletics director at the University of Washington, where he was responsible for cutting the men’s and women’s swimming & diving programs.

One more name that has had talks with LSU is Ron Aitken, who is currently the head coach of the Sandpipers of Nevada swim club in Las Vegas. That program, which focuses mostly on 18 & under athletes, is one of a handful of clubs recognized as a Gold Medal Club nationally. The program produces multiple NCAA Division I athletes every year. He has coached with the Sandpipers since 1994 and also is the head coach of state power high school Bishop Gorman. A 1992 graduate of UNLV, Aitken doesn’t have any college coaching experience.

Woodward has been pitching around the country that he’s ready to spend to bring in a coach who will improve the level of the program. The former head coach Geyer had a base salary of $115,000 for the 2019-2020 fiscal year. That spending, though, is not expected to include a new pool. While LSU has an 8-lane, 50 meter indoor pool with a separate diving well, though it doesn’t have the same sense of scale or flash as some top programs in the conference like Georgia, Texas A&M, or Auburn

Update: LSU Names Rick Bishop as New Head Swimming & Diving Coach. Bishop has helped rebuild the women's program at Michigan into a national power.
Assistant coach Steve Mellor, who led the LSU sprint group that included Tokyo 2020 Olympian Brooks Curry, will remain with the program under Bishop.

Bishop, who has been a party-of-interest for several high profile collegiate coaching positions this offseason, has spent the last 8 seasons as an associate head coach at the University of Michigan. There, he helped lead the women’s program to 3 consecutive Big Ten Championships from 2016-2018 and back-to-back top 4 team finishes at the NCAA Championships in 2018 and 2019.

Among the swimmers who train primarily with Bishop are NCAA Champion, World Champion, and U.S. Open Record breaker Maggie MacNeil. Bishop is also the primary coach of Michigan post-grad Siobhan Haughey, who has broken a number of Hong Kong National Records and become a strong medal contender for this summer’s Tokyo Olympic Games.

Bishop leaves for Hong Kong on Friday morning for a pre-Olympic training camp and will travel to the Olympic Games with Haughey in July. Bishop has been writing the training for the National Team group in Hong Kong that includes Jamie Yeung and Ian Ho, who recently broke the Hong Kong record in the 50 free.

Bishop’s international appointments include as an assistant coach for the U.S. at the 2016 FINA Swimming World Championships in Canada and the 2017 World University Games in Taiwan. He also spent 2 years on the Brazilian National Team coaching staff, serving as an assistant coach at the 1995 World Championships in Rio and 1995 Pan American Games in Argentina. He led the Brazilian women’s team at the 1996 Olympic Games.

He also served as an assistant for Jamaica at the 1998 Pan American Games and the head coach for the Netherlands Antilles at the 2007 World Championships.

Prior to joining the staff at Michigan, Bishop spent 4 years working at USA Swimming working in the sport performance role. He also had stops as an assistant at Harvard (1988-91), the University of Memphis Tiger Swimming Club (1992-96), and with two of the most historic high school programs in the country: as an assistant at the famed Bolles School (1998-2002) as the head coach The Baylor School (2002-2006), and back at The Bolles School as the head coach in 2006.

LSU rising junior Brooks Curry, the 2020 SEC Champion in the 100 free as a freshman, qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team last week by placing 4th in that event in Omaha. That makes him the first American Olympian in program history. Curry trains primarily in the sprint group with associate head coach Steve Mellor.

Thanks Diggerest! Been away from the rant for a while so just catching up. Do you consider this a good, very good or not so great hire? Have seen a lot of Michigan caps over the years in big competitions. Did Phelps wear a Michigan cap at one point? Seem to remember that.

It's the Mexican aquaman.



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