Chip Kline, courtesy: Kentucky Athletics
Indiana Swim Club, the USA Swimming club team based out of Indiana University in Bloomington, has announced the hiring of Chip Kline as its new head coach. Kline will assume the position on September 1, 2020.
Kline most recently spent the last 7 seasons as an assistant coach at the University of Kentucky, including the last 4 as an associate head coach. Prior to that, he spent 8 seasons at the University of Virginia, working primarily with the sprint group there.
During his time at Kentucky, the women’s team had 6 consecutive top 25 finishes at the NCAA Championships, and last season placed 3rd at the SEC Championships. Prior to that, while a coach at Virginia, the Cavaliers combined for 13 ACC team titles including a record 6 consecutive titles for both the men’s and women’s seasons.
He also spent 5 seasons as an assistant at the University of Tennessee, and 4 seasons at NC State, where he was promoted to associate head coach.
“I am excited to take the lead in building a top-flight club that will become the backbone of age group (youth) swimming in Bloomington and increase ISC’s leadership in the Indiana swimming community,” Kline said of his new position.
Indiana head coach Ray Looze says that Kline will have no official role in coaching Indiana University swimmers nor the post-graduate group.
Phil Cole, the former head coach of Indiana Swim Club and Bloomington South High School, retired last spring. Jeff LeBeau was promoted to interim head coach for the 2019 short course season, but in March, as the coronavirus pandemic was ramping up in the US, he left to become the associate head coach at Newburgh Sea Creatures – another Indiana club and the childhood home of Olympic gold medalist Lily King.
Since them, Curtis Goss stepped in as interim head coach, a role that he’s held for most of the pandemic.
During pre-pandemic times, ISC practices out of 5 pools, including Bloomington High School North and Bloomington High School South, plus 3 pools on the Indiana University campus. Since the restart of training, they have also been using the Southeast YMCA pool.
About Indiana Swim Club:
ISC was originally founded in 1955 as Bloomington Swim Club by the legendary Dr. James E. “Doc” Counsilman as a competitive swimming program for children ages 5-21. Originally sponsored by Bloomington Parks and Recreation, the club became a not-for-profit organization in 1967, run by a Board of Directors consisting of parents and other interested members of the community. In 2018, Bloomington Swim Club joined with the Counsilman Center Indiana Swim Team to form the Indiana Swim Club. ISC is a member of USA Swimming, the national governing body for the sport of swimming, and Indiana Swimming, Inc. (ISI), the governing body for swimming in the state of Indiana.
It is as bad as everyone has said it could be, and even worse off the deck.
I’m Samuel Hendrix, I was a swimmer on the 2016-2018 University of Kentucky (UK) swim team. I was a sprint freestyle and butterfly swimmer, so I had directly swam underneath “Chip” for those 2 years before I ended up transferring. For me the bad outweighed the good for my opinion of him. To summarize my experience here are a list of things that happened to me:
His nickname for me was “meatball” and “fat Sam” (to differentiate because there were 2 Sams on the team) because I started my swimming career around 215lb and those names continued for 2 years even when I got down to 195lb.
He told me I “was a terrible R.O.I. (Return on investment)… Read more »
I swam for UK for 3 years from 2014-2017. During that time I experienced and witnessed many things that I would characterize as unacceptable from many members of the coaching staff. Chip Kline was most definitely the worst.
A few examples come to mind, but these are merely a drop in the murky water that is Chip’s coaching style:
In 2014, when asked by a person on the men’s team why a certain girl on the women’s team was recruited (she was not particularly fast but very athletic) Chip’s response was “We had to give you boys something to play with.”
2014, during my first practice with the team, the first and only thing chip said to me… Read more »
Did you ever report this? If true, much of this behavior–the whipping with the stopwatch and some of these comments–would be reportable. But there’s NO reports that are visible anywhere.
Just don’t let him handle the budget….
Swimswam has great content followed by ridiculous trolling. How pathetic do you have to be to troll a swim website? Swimswam should check into this. From what I can tell, the negative comments are coming from one individual that is changing their names to appear as multiple individuals. Really sad that they have such an issue that they have to troll on this website.
Negative is subjective
The multiple usernames were already addressed in the comments by Braden aka “mr. SwimSwam”
Well, I guess technically one commenter could just create a bunch of email addresses and then separately comment from each one, but I heard the Russian troll-farms were a bit backlogged right now and not accepting new clients until November. So, maybe it is actually at least a few people with less than glowing perspectives of a coach
There have been 2 individuals that we can identify who attempted to use multiple user names.
There are always workarounds and technical jumps, but all indications are that there are definitely multiple commenters in this thread.
My guess is all the Kentucky swimmers know about the story and if they felt something was missing they would have spoken up by now. Remember the Notre dame coach had a swimmer go off the deep end on her but plenty of other swimmers pushed on his narrative.
I saw Chip late last Fall and again this Spring…know he slipped while at work and severely injured himself requiring 2 major surgeries and months of PT. Seems like a very good time to exit college coaching!!!
This thread reminds me of the one that occurred after Petra Martin was fired at Rutgers for being “abusive.”. Lots of anonymous current/former swimmers bashing her, sometimes under multiple user names, just like here. And what happened to her? She won a $750,000 settlement and was totally exonerated by Rutgers, then hired as an assistant coach at Arkansas. So I take these comments with a grain of salt. Sometimes complaints, especially ones posted on SwimSwam are just BS.
Gotta love the immature recent postgrads posting to get their “last laugh” as they are unhappy with their current life situations. Unfortunate they never stood up when they had the chance. Or tried to take the “moral high ground” in the moment against Anyone. But now on a swim website they want to take their stand. Absolutely comical
I don’t think anyone is posting for a quick ‘laugh’. It seems poignant that most posts are showing a darker side to Chip Kline, and only a few are standing up for him. I agree, someone should have stood up for themselves during his tenure, but if he was such a positive influence, what would they have to stand up against anyways?
Well as you probably know… Most people don’t become internet warriors to express positivity. They only do so to express negativity therefore the overwhelming negativity that comes with sports and online boards. I had said he was a positive influence for me. But for anyone on this forum who swam at Kentucky to say that Chip said anything worse than the other coaches is lying and they know it, therefore why only criticize Chip and not the whole staff?
I wasn’t under the impression this post was about the Kentucky coaching staff. But, it seems like you have something you might want to say about the staff as a whole, no?
Actually @Daddy, when coaches get new jobs I often see many very positive comments on SwimSwam. Go read the comments when Guntoro got announced for UNCW. Heaps of positives and don’t see any alums, swimmers or recruits dishing about what a bad guy or bad hire he is. Chip is obviously a controversial figure. I guess that isn’t surprising since Bloomington looks like it needed to re-up it’s intrigue quotient.
Ah I will just take mountains of data and throw it out the window to the contrary because Guntoro got announced and got lots of positive reviews. I highly doubt many of the people here weren’t involved because of GroupMe’s, Group Texts etc, and then voiced their opinions wanting to stir the pot.
Daddy – they’re just teaching Chip about the real world. He didn’t get the job done, so he was let go, amiright? 😉 In the real world, you get feedback on your job performance, and if you don’t do the job well, you get let go, amiright? Yes, sometimes that feedback is harsh, but that’s the real world, amiright?
Welcome, Chip, and Daddy, to the real world!
Sounds like he will fit right in with Looze with comments like this!
Put down the J my friend.