Bolles School Veterans Show Out at SEC Swimming & Diving Championships

The Bolles School in Jacksonville, Florida is one of the best high school swimming programs in the country, and along with its affiliated club team, has been for decades.

The Bolles program has produced some of the best American swimmers of the last decade, including Olympic gold medalists Ryan Murphy (school + club), Joseph Schooling (school + club), and Caeleb Dressel (club). From past generations, that includes names like Martin Zubero, Gus Borges, George Bovell, and Trina Jackson.

In fact, since 1972, Bolles has sent at least 63 swimmers to the Olympics who have combined to win 29 medals and 18 gold medals.

While the path from high school coaching to big-time college coaching is a long, meandering, and for many an impossible hurdle, Bolles has developed a penchant not only for sending swimmers to big-time college programs, but coaches too.

This was highlighted in a photograph taken at last weekend’s SEC Championships, which featured five former Bolles School coaches on deck in College Station.

From left-to-right:

• Florida head coach Anthony Nesty (Bolles alumnus, former Bolles assistant)
•  LSU head coach Rick Bishop (former Bolles assistant for four years from 1998-2002, returned as head coach)
• LSU associate head coach Jon Sakovich (former Bolles head coach, Bolles coach for 19 seasons)
• Texas A&M associate head coach Jason Calanog (former Bolles senior assistant coach from 2007-2015, which included leading Caeleb Dressel’s group)
• South Carolina head coach Jeff Poppell (former head coach at Bolles for 13 years)

And that doesn’t even include coaches in other conferences, like Virginia Tech head coach Sergio Lopez, who was the architect of the Dressel-Murphy-Schooling-Condorelli years.

The Bolles School, of course, is not like most other high schools. It is an athletics powerhouse across a number of sports, having produced a number of MLB, NFL, and NBA players. With full tuition for high school students (non-resident) checking in at $30,810, they also have some resources to work with.

Much of the coaching train into the SEC comes via the cog of Gregg Troy, former Florida and Bolles head coach, who had no qualms about hiring his former swimmers and assistants in his time with the Gators. Nesty and Poppell were both Troy assistants at one point. But Bishop, for example, is now continuing that tradition with the hiring of Sakovich.

Between the program’s tradition, the alumni network, and the raw success of the program (they’ve proven that they can develop elite-caliber swimmers), Bolles has figured out the formula to push coaches upward to big-time programs. There’s a reason that Bolles is one of the most-coveted high school jobs in the country.