NCAA Division III Illinois Wesleyan University will head into its conference championship meet with an interim head coach after the departure of head coach Teresa Fish and assistant coach Tommy Gilbert.
Volunteer assistant Adam Blanchard, an alumnus of the program and 2019 graduate, has been promoted to interim head coach, and Steve Paska, diving coach Kevin McCarthy, and Kim Nelson-Brown will serve as assistants.
“I want to thank Teresa and Tommy for their years of service at Illinois Wesleyan,” Director of Athletics Mike Wagner said, without sharing further details.
Blanchard swam for four seasons at Illinois Wesleyan and is currently listed as a coach with the Funky Fish Swim Club, owned by the former IWU head coach Teresa Fish. Paska is also an assistant with that club.
Nelson-Brown is the team’s head women’s volleyball coach, an associate athletics director, and the school’s senior woman administrator. She is a four-time CCIW Coach of the Year in volleyball.
Illinois Wesleyan will compete at the CCIW Conference Championship meet in Kenosha, Wisconsin from February 19-22. Last year, the women’s and men’s teams both finished 4th of 7 teams.
Fish is a 1988 graduate of Kenyon College in Ohio where she was a 14-time NCAA Division III national champion and 27-time All-American. She was hired by Illinois Wesleyan in 1995 and was named the CCIW Conference Coach of the Year ten times in her career.
Illinois Wesleyan is one of several programs that have found themselves making coaching changes in the weeks leading up to conference season. NCAA Division II Maryville University in St. Louis and NCAA Division III Berry College in Georgia have also made head coaching changes in the last week.
Braden: hard to not notice THREE women coaches leaving or “let go” within a week or two of conference championships. Can Swimswim find out the reasons? Odd occurrence in any collegiate sport, IMHO.
Berry is pretty obvious if you check the comments.
I have to see the reasons. Comments are one thing, and yes, can/could be based on personal experience. I am not dismissing any comments from previous stories, but it opens the door to multiple attacks without knowing who the person reporting is, and their connection to a program. Try to not rush to judgement.
Okay… but the audio is pretty damning in any context.
Checked the audio. It was quite a rant.
We’re working on it, but it’s really difficult to figure out in a way that we have solidly enough to report.
I think one of them is pretty clear.
Thanks! I know these are tough, and if one is very clear, from audio, as noted above, even better. Be really nice if those all were clear. But, that is not how the world works.
What does “from audio” mean?
Believe this “audio” is in reference to the Berry college coach being removed.
Berry College Head Swim Coach Astrid Escobar Resigns a Week Before Conference Championship
^ link for that story. If you view the comments, there is a posted YouTube video of coach’s behavior when talking with their swimmers that forwarded to the coach’s removal. This is my best guess of “from audio”.
It’s about the Berry post and the audio from that. It’s not anything related to IWU.
Contact me and I can give you the hard evidence of what really happened
Teresa has been there a long long time. This is super odd
Tommy has also been there for a long period of time. Just like Adam (the interim coach now), also swam for 4 years under Coach Fish. The school removing a 10+ year coach and an assistant coach who was an alumni is super strange.
Not strange at all. There are very good reasons.
As a parent of a current IWU swimmer, there are very valid reasons for the dismissals.
As an old IWU swimmer, I am curious to know these reasons…
Comments containing the reasons are being removed
What are these reasons? You made an anonymous post, so you can follow up.
—
Comments containing the reasons are being removed.
This is another example of the whole college coaching profession being in shambles. Is it any wonder when programs are dropped or rosters cut? That lack of knowledge, experience, qualifications and professionalism is alarming! I wouldn’t trust some of these coaches to work with 8-unders. The athletes and the sport deserve better…
Sillinger,
People leave positions, by choice and not by choice, all the time. To suggest that coaches are the problem across the board is harmful. Coaching at the college level is a hard job. It requires long hours, extreme patience, and earning trust from young people who don’t easily trust anyone but their peers. It’s often thankless and the pay is criminally low far more often than not. We get little support from administrators who would rather not deal with problems related to swim and dive, but we’re responsible for the most important thing on campus for our students. Maybe the problem is not the coaching profession but the treatment of college coaches, which drives many out of the… Read more »
“Secure a capable team of interim coaches”, you can definitely say that again. Steve Paska is an absolute legend! A previous DI all-star coach that led the redbirds to many fantastic seasons. Props to Steve for steeping up for the Titans!
8-unders are people too.
what is up with all of these coaches leaving before the conference meet? Feel like I’ve never heard of this happening before and this is the third story in like a week.
Usually in situations like this the departure is not the choice of the coach.
Crank up the rumor mill
>Volunteer assistant Adam Blanchard, an alumnus of the program and 2019 graduate, has been promoted to interim head coach
Please tell me this guy is going to get paid.
“Your volunteer status remains as you fill the roll until the end of the season, then we will interview you for the position once it’s posted”
On the official school website, it has been claimed an “immediate national search” has stared.
Hmmm something tells me there is a story behind a coach and an assistant being let go a week before champs.