Jeff Julian Will Leave Rose Bowl to Start New Pro Group at Mission Viejo

The Mission Viejo Nadadores have hired Jeff Julian to launch a Professional and Post Grad Performance Training Center at the Marguerite Aquatic Center. His wife, 1996 Olympic gold medalist Kristine (Quance) Julian, will also serve as a senior coach for the Nadadores alongside senior head coach Logan Redondo.

Julian will make the move about an hour south from the Rose Bowl Swim Team, where he had been the head coach since 2004.

“The Nadadores are thrilled to bring the Julian family to Mission Viejo. Jeff will help us create, manage, and coach a new pro/post grad level of the program. His TEAM centered and process focused vision fit seamlessly with the updated “whole athlete” mantra of the Nadadores. Jeff will focus on this top tier of the program, which is designed to meet most every need of the elite athlete: nutrition, strength training, cryotherapy, sports psychology, professional internships, and dedicated water time. We believe Jeff will lead the Nadadores to Olympic success in the next two quads and we intend to both support and integrate these athletes into our total programming,” said Executive Director (and former Nadador Olympic Silver Medalist) Michele Mitchell.

Besides his club coaching duties, Julian is currently the head coach of the Cali Condors of the International Swimming League, the 2021 league runners-up, so he’s already well-tapped into the professional swimming circuit.

The Nadadores were famed for recruiting some of America’s best swimmers in the 1970s and 1980s, though at the time there wasn’t much of a professional or post-graduate scene to tap into. Mark Schubert, who was a head coach for much of the club’s glory days, returned to Mission Viejo in 2016. While the club had a few professional and post-graduate swimmers who represented the team, Schubert was unable to rebuild the pro group to its former glory days in his 5-year tenure.

In modern swimming, most professional and post-graduate groups in the United States are now centered around collegiate swimming programs, so this pro group will be a unique opportunity.

Schubert abruptly left the club in late 2021 in order to form a new “elite training group” at nearby SET Swim Team. His departure coincided with the hiring of Michele Mitchell, a two-time Olympic medalist in diving, as the Nadadores’ new executive director.

The club, meanwhile, has promoted Logan Redondo and Jacinta Beckman as co-head coaches of the amateur arm of the team, with Redondo leading the Senior Division and Beckman leading the Junior Division.

Kristine (Quance) Julian was a 1996 Olympic gold medalist as the breaststroke leg of the prelims American 400 medley relay. She also won a medley relay silver at the 1994 World Championships and a 400 IM bronze.

She has a long coaching resume as well that includes working with age group swimmers as a coach at Rose Bowl Aquatics. She is also currently serving as a volunteer assistant with UCLA.

Rose Bowl, Julian’s former team, had one swimmer represent the club at the 2021 Wave II US Olympic Swimming Trials: Julian’s son Trenton Julian, who trained collegiately at Cal. Rose Bowl is the home training ground of Rex Maurer, the #2-ranked recruit in the high school class of 2023. Maurer joined the club in the summer of 2020, when his mom, Lea Maurer, took a job as the associate head coach at nearby USC.

Jeff Julian himself was an international-caliber swimmer as a member of the US National Team and a Pac-10 Champion. He also recently spent a stint as an assistant coach with the varsity team at USC.

Mission Viejo, meanwhile, was represented by a number of swimmers and qualified 5 swimmers for the National Team. In addition to the hired-guns, they were represented by home grown swimmers as well, including Justina Kozan, Katie Crom, Macky Hodges, plus Michael Brinegar, who took a year off from Indiana to train back home with Mark Schubert (who was his coach at the Golden West Swim Club in high school).

The Nadadores are based out of the Marguerite Aquatic Center, which reopened in 2018 after an $11 million renovation. The facility gives the Nadadores swimming and diving programs a lot of water to work with – it features a 50-meter x 25 yard competition pool, a 25-meter x 25 yard warm-up, diving, and training pool, and a separate four-lane 25-yard training course in a third pool.

Mitchell says that Mission Viejo currently has between 210 and 230 divers, depending on the month; 401 registered club swimmers, and over 200 Masters swimmers.

Julian has been battling Stage IV lung cancer since 2015 and in April of this year announced that a CT scan came back with no evidence of disease.

Jeff Julian is expected to start at Mission Viejo around February 1, while Kristine will follow around April 1. Mitchell says that this rounds out the club’s hiring for the top end of their coaching staff.

Julian’s reflection on Instagram: