After Texas A&M women lost their assistant Tracy Duhac to the new regime at the University of Arizona, there was a lot of speculation about who they would hire to replace her.
All of a sudden, working at Texas A&M under head coach Steve Bultman had become a primo-position, as Bultman has begun to build his own coach tree (he himself is a former assistant of the legendary Jack Bauerle at Georgia). With one of the top-performing freshmen classes in the nation last season, whoever earned this job is lined up for huge successes over the next several years, and a lot of Aggie fans were clamoring for an experienced assistant who didn’t just few the position as a stepping-stone to another assistant job at a bigger program.
The Aggies, however decided to stick with the formula that worked for them before of hiring a very young assistant from an unheralded program, and if Tanica Jamison is half as good of a coach as she was a swimmer, then they did very well for themselves.
Jamison’s previous stop was as an assistant for both the Pitt men’s and women’s teams, but she also served as the head coach of USA Swimming’s 2011 National Diversity Camp, which is a huge honor.
During her swimming career at A&M rivals the University of Texas, Jamison was the 2000 Big 12 Freshman of the Year, an 11-time All-American a two-time Olympic Trials finalist, a World University Games gold medalist, and a two-time team captain.
If you think that Jamison’s college coaching credentials at Pitt don’t make her worthy of the lone paid-assistant position for a program that has reached perennial top-10 status (five straight years), remember that in 2006 when Bultman hired Duchac, it was just months after she graduated from Purdue, where she only spent one year as a graduate assistant. He’s proven that he can create magic and is a master of bringing young, talented assistants to their full potential.
