Cal assistant Jesse Moore is leaving the college coaching ranks to “pursue coaching in a different capacity outside of swimming.”
“I’m moving back to Minneapolis in July, and I have a pretty exciting expansion of my business that I’m looking forward to growing,” Moore said in a video posted to Instagram on Saturday.
He said he was grateful to swimmers and coaches he’s worked with over his 15-year coaching career, adding that he’s “leaving swimming with the biggest and fullest heart in the world.”
Moore joined Cal last April after one season as the head coach at Dartmouth. A month later, allegations of harassment and bullying surfaced against longtime Cal women’s head coach Teri McKeever, resulting in Moore being named acting women’s head coach for a period last summer.
Before he signed off, Moore offered a public service announcement about the lack of female coaches in the sport.
“This has nothing to do with Cal,” he said. “This is me doing my spicy PSA to the world of swimming as I do exit, while I have people’s attention. We, as a swimming community, especially in college, are doing a horrible job of supporting women and retaining women in coaching. We’re doing a terrible job of hiring women. If I have to hear another male coach across the country say, ‘We have to hire a woman,’ and have that one woman on their staff, I’m going to go crazy.
“We need to do a better job of understanding why we’re losing so many,” Moore said. “Especially in the last few years, we’ve lost a lot of, even younger, amazing women coaches. By failing our women coaches, we’re failing our male and female and gender non-binary student athletes. We can do better, so to all the male coaches out there, it’s time to do a deeper dive than you’ve ever done. We need to provide more opportunity and we need to stop sucking at this.”
Moore took over the Dartmouth program as head coach in April 2021. The team was coming out of the COVID-19 season where not only did the Ivy League cancel all competition, but the school cut, and then reinstated, the swimming & diving programs.
Moore spent the prior three seasons at Minnesota, where he oversaw the middle distance and IM groups, coordinated recruiting, and managed rosters for both the men’s and women’s programs. While at Minnesota, Moore coached 33 NCAA qualifiers and helped both the men’s and women’s team earn top 20 finishes at the 2019 NCAA Championships.
Before coming to Minnesota, Moore served as the associate head coach at Northwestern University, where he coached all training groups, led recruiting efforts, managed social media accounts, and coordinated team travel. During his time there, the team thrived in both the pool and the classroom, making it to NCAAs in both 2017 and 2018 and earning multiple CSCAA All-America and Big Ten individual honors.
Prior to Northwestern, Moore also worked as an assistant coach at Duke (2012-16), and at his alma mater William & Mary (2010-12), where he earned his MBA while working as an assistant coach.
Moore launched his coaching career in 2008, working as a graduate assistant academic advisor at Drexel for two years. In this role, he advised students from several different athletic teams and worked as a volunteer assistant coach with the swimming and diving teams.
Watch this interview
This is not a career coach
Good luck
Move on
I would say that Jesse was the definition of a “career” coach…The comment section is pretty hypocritical of this guy. First, he is criticized for moving from program to program, upending his life year after year for the sport. Then we say he is not a career coach, which is “old coach” speak for the professional masochist attitude this sport has toward its own coaches.
I am not defending Jesse. I don’t know maybe I am, but you should not need a defense when simply switching careers.
So do we just assume Marsh is women’s head coach now?
I don’t see why they would change the current setup of having Dave Durden be the head coach of both teams and delegate an associate to lead programs.
Was it ever officially stated that this was a permanent solution moving forward? I thought it was implied that it was temporary because technically Mckeever was only on leave until recently.
He’s not wrong about women’s coaches. Although the last few years I think it might be able to expand to saying we need to do a better job retaining coaches regardless of gender. It seems like people are leaving the profession at a much, much higher rate than ever before.
Most coaching jobs do not pay super well, have high working hours, and to top that off usually most head coaches leadership styles do not allow for their assistants to actually write practices and coach. Its like the trifecta for unhappiness. Someone needs to do a research study on this.
It is funny to see head coaches that have the ability to hire trustworthy, experienced coaches, and instead hire incompetent coaches and then have to write everything themselves which ultimately leads to ineffective coaching, because 1 coach can’t watch and effectively coach every single swimmer OR they just refuse to trust anyone even if they are an experienced coach. Failure is the best teacher and you can’t fail or succeed if you’re never given the opportunity to do so
I would be happy to contribute to that research study. Boy, do I have some stories.
You’re absolutely right though. I doubt Teri’s ego would have allowed Jesse the freedom to write practices and establish his own style. For someone who has been in a head coaching position before, albeit briefly, this is going to be an especially hard adjustment to make.
But Jesse literally left a head coaching position to take an assistant job there so that is a little bit on him if he wanted more freedom
Yeah and while I don’t know him, I would bet he is secretly kicking himself every day for giving up a gig that sweet to be Teri’s assistant. An assistant coaching job at Cal is an upgrade from being the head coach at Dartmouth on a resume but, as Jesse found out, being an assistant coach means having your career tied to someone else’s personal conduct. That’s never an ideal situation.
In the immortal words of Captain Picard, “There really is no substitute for holding the reigns”.
May 1st is the normal day that Athletic Department notify coaches, if their contract is going to be renewed.
Trying to allude to something?
What is his other business?
It’s business time
Happy trails. Must have been quite the ride from the day he was hired until today.
I would have been counting down the days to my contract ending to get out of that mess.
Time to put that LLC to use
A true visionary