By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
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After 3 NCAA titles in 13 seasons Stanford women’s head coach Greg Meehan is off to Colorado Springs to head up a new role at USA Swimming as the U.S. National Team Director.
While there are many questions to be asked and answered about what this means for the future of USA Swimming, there are also some big ones for the program he’s leaving behind in California.
The school is home to the defending Olympic Champion in the 100 meter butterfly Torri Huske, one of the key American women heading toward the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games. Huske, the superstar who stayed with Meehan when others (Claire Curzan, Regan Smith) left is the defending NCAA Champion in the 200 IM and the leader of a Stanford team that finished 2nd at the NCAA Championships last season.
The Cardinal return 76.7% of their individual points from last season, more than any other team in the top 4, so the cupboard is full for whoever takes over.
The challenge with Stanford in the NIL era is that it is exceedingly rare and difficult for students to transfer into Stanford – they get maybe 20 per year among the whole university. The flipside of that is that the Stanford reputation means that swimmers very rarely transfer out – the degree is worth it. That doesn’t mean that a swimmer mightn’t take a semester off and grad transfer for the NCAA Championships, but the Cardinal overall have a different calculus than many schools.
Stanford coaching jobs are sort of an interesting duck. The program has huge legacy and prestige, and substantial recruiting chops – for good students (which fortunately, many top swimmers are). But acceptance is difficult, and the pay, on scope of the cost of living in the area, is not that impressive – certainly not when stacked against salaries like Matt Kredich‘s $270,000+ annually in Knoxville (though Stanford usually provides housing to coaches). Kredich did train as a post-grad at Stanford and has always spoken highly of the place and the school, so maybe there’s a chance for a “life move” even if it’s not the most logical “career move” in there.
The turmoil everywhere means that an associate who is comfortable where they’re at might not want to make the leap – albeit a great opportunity – because of the uncertainty around the future of college swimming.
That makes the pool for this job really hard to scope, in spite of it being such a high profile job.
This is likely to be the big domino in what is expected to be a relatively-quiet offseason at the D1 level. Not many high profile jobs have coaches on the hot seat, though this will kick off a little bit of a churn depending on who takes the gig.
Let’s dig in.
The Obvious Choice
The most obvious choice for this role is already on deck: associate head coach Katie Robinson. She was a rising star as the head coach of Northwestern’s men’s and women’s programs, where the teams broke 28 school records and their highest CSCAA national poll ranking in school history. The women finished 16th at the 2021 NCAA Championships, their best team finish in over 25 years. And she did it all in just three years at the helm.
There was speculation when she made the move to Stanford that it was as much about taking a step back from the grind of head coaching as it was anything else, though head coaching a single gender program is a very different animal than head coaching a dual gender program.
If Robinson wants to become a head coach (and one would have to believe
The Other Obvious Choice
Most folks had the National Team Director race down to Meehan and coach David Marsh*. The two are ‘coach cousins’ as they both have been associate head coaches under Dave Durden at Cal.
The other two names circulating most strongly were Jack Bauerle and Bruce Gemmell. All 4 were declared as the definite choice by a member of the proletariat at some point in this process.
Marsh wouldn’t have to move far – the two campuses are about an hour apart – and he loves California. This would give him an opportunity to finish his career in a prestigious role in the state where he wants to live. That feels like a big win for him.
Marsh is, of course, one of the most successful college coaches in history, leading Auburn to 12 NCAA titles in the 1990s and 2000s. He has coached Olympians and top club swimmers and around the world and has maybe the most holistic level of experience of any coach right now, if we look at the breadth of that experience in addition to that success.
It’s a resume any AD would love – though there are almost no two more-different colleges in Power 4 athletics than Auburn and Stanford.
What Else?
Figuring out who else to include in this list was a chore. I think if you’re looking through top 20 NCAA teams, you’re mostly looking at associate head coaches. I don’t think any head coach in that range (who wasn’t heavily dependent on diving to get there) has a good reason to leave their current program.
There also aren’t a lot of folks with Stanford ties in swimming (it’s too bad Neil Caskey got out of coaching, because he feels like a good candidate for this job).
So you’re looking at either a mid-major head coach with a hot hand (which is where Stanford looked to hire Dan Schemmel from Hawaii).
We’re kind of throwing stuff at the wall here, but let’s do it:
Sam Pitter, Head Coach, Miami (Ohio) – In her first season with the Redhawks, Pitter took the men to a Missouri Valley Conference title and the women to a 3rd-place finish in the MAC. She made the team’s best swimmer Madeline Padavic better, and had a qualifier for the NCAA Championships (Padavic). Most of her coaching resume consists of schools like MIT and Harvard, so she understands the elite academic environment. I think she needs another year or two at Miami to get a job like this, but if it’s 2028 and the Redhawks are still cooking and I’ve got a job like this open, I’m definitely giving Sam Pitter an interview.
Geoff Hanson, Head Coach, Southern Illinois – In spite of a few minor controversies in his career, Hanson has really built something impressive at Southern Illinois. The Salukis had multiple qualifiers at the women’s NCAA Championship meet, including Celia Pulido finishing 4th in the 100 backstroke (an event where Stanford didn’t score any points). He also coached some high profile swimmers when he was an assistant at Arizona.
Sean Schimmel, Associate Head Coach, Penn State – Schimmel has a lot of different experiences, including at big time programs like the University of Maryland (RIP) and the University of Georgia. He’s also got power conference head coaching experience, leading Arkansas from 2012-2016. Seems like he’s going to find his way back in charge of a program before his career is over.
Erik Posegay, Associate Head Coach, Texas – Erik Posegay has had a lot of success at a lot of places and is the associate head coach for the defending NCAA Champion men’s team, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a good history of working with women – especially distance women. He was at women’s NCAAs and reportedly worked with 500/1650 free NCAA Champion Jillian Cox. He also previously coached at Wisconsin, where the women’s team was the strength and where he coached Ally McHugh onto the 2019 World Championship Team and NCAA Champion Paige McKenna. Posegay first made his mark as a club coach in Pennsylvania when he coached G Ryan to a surprise US National Championship in the 800 free while still in high school. Posegay also spent time as the US Junior National Team Director before joining Bowman in Texas.
Mitch Dalton, Associate Head Coach, Texas – The former US Junior National Team Director, now the #2 with the Texas women’s program who are coming off 2nd-2nd-2nd-2nd-3rd place finishes at NCAAs over the last five years, Dalton will be in a lot of conversations for upcoming head coaching jobs. That being said – the #2 in any program in any sport at the University of Texas in the next few years is probably a better place to be than #1 at all but a handful of other schools, just because of Texas’ might and ability to withstand the coming changes. I think he holds on for something bigger a few years down the road when he has more experience and more time on deck working with Bob Bowman.
Worth mentioning that Texas has a job posting for an assistant swim coach online.
Whitney Hite, Associate Head Coach, Florida – Another associate head coach with Power 4 head coaching experience, Hite was the head coach at Wisconsin in the 2010s and got a handful of international appointments out of it as well. He coached NCAA Champions and other swimmers of ‘Stanford caliber’ there, and has continued to do so at Florida. He is also a former Cal women’s assistant coach, and for all of their rivalry, the two programs do have a lot of ties in swimming. He was also the head coach at the University of Washington for three seasons before the program was cut and an assistant at Georgia when they won three straight NCAA titles. There are lots of big regional ties here, and Florida is the kind of program where all the assistants wind up on radars.
I kicked around the idea of the other top associates from programs like Tennessee and Louisville, where the teams have been performing very well, and none of them made total sense to me. Steph Juncker at Louisville, an alum of that program, has to be in the conversation for just about every head coaching job that comes up these days – but if she wanted to leave, I would think she would have done so by now. But, maybe the prestige of Stanford is what entices her to make the leap.
From Tennessee, associate head coach Sarah Collins has a husband Rob Collins on staff; being able to work on the same staff as two high level swim coaches is rare and with the split programs at Stanford would be tough to pull off there. Ashley Jahn from Tennessee has a lot of west coast ties (went to the Air Force Academy, coached at Idaho). Like a few others on this list (Dalton, Pitter), I think she’s still a few years away from a job like this.
So that’s the list we could come up with. Who did we miss? Who is definitely not taking the job because their grandma lives two blocks from their current campus? What high-flying alumni did we not think of? Who does and does not follow Stanford women’s swimming on Instagram? Let’s dig this out.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: Wild Speculation: Who Will Take Over for Greg Meehan as Stanford’s Women’s Head Swim Coach?
