Jeremy Kipp has announced his first hire since taking over the newly-combined men’s and women’s swimming & diving program at Northwestern. He will bring in former two-time NCAA All-American swimmer Meghan Hawthorne as his first-announced assistant coach. Hawthorne was Kipp’s assistant at the pair’s prior stop at Boise State, and also swam for him while Kipp was an assistant at USC.
The two had a successful run at Boise State: after finishing 2nd at the Mountain West Conference Championships in 2016, their first season, the team won two straight conference titles. They won 13 individual and 13 relay titles in those 3 seasons and sent 9 swimmers and 1 diver to the NCAA Women’s National Championship meet.
After graduating USC and before her hiring at Boise State, Hawthorne was a coach with the Rattler Swim Club in San Fernando, California from 2009 through 2015, and swam with the club from 2001 through 2014. She also served as an assistant with the Viewpoint School.
As an athlete, Hawthorne spent 2 years as a member of the USA Swimming National Team in the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 seasons, inicluding finishing 6th in the 400 IM at the 2012 Olympic Trials. She earned a silver medal in that event at the 2013 World University Games.
Hawthorne graduated from USC in 2014 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in human biology and a minor in occupational science and earned her Masters in educational leadership from Boise State in May 2018.
SwimSwam’s Swimulator tool shows that last year, Boise State would have been projected to win an all-events, swimming-only dual meet against Northwestern by a slim margin based on season-best times. Northwestern finished 22nd at last year’s NCAA Women’s Championships, with all 40 points coming from diver Olivia Rosendahl, who won her second-straight NCAA title on platform. She and Northwestern’s other NCAA qualifier, Calypso Sheridan, were both underclassment last season. The women finished 7th out of 13 teams at the Big Ten Championships, while the men were 9th out of 10 teams, beating out Michigan State by 12.5 points.
“Meghan played an integral role in the success we had at Boise State,” Kipp said. “She is an outstanding recruiter and remarkably well organized, but what makes her so special is her ability to connect with the student-athletes. She was a tremendous swimmer as an All-American and U.S. National team member, but not all great swimmers can make the jump to great mentor and coach like she has in her career. The student-athletes she has worked with know she cares deeply about their goals and I have seen them achieve great things because of the relationship and energy Meghan brings to every training session.”
“I am incredibly honored and humbled to be joining the Northwestern family,” Hawthorne said. “From the moment I walked on campus I felt right at home. Northwestern has a rich history in both academics and athletics that I’m very excited to be a part of. I am so grateful for the opportunity to continue to work alongside Jeremy and am looking forward to this new journey as a Wildcat. Go ‘Cats!”
Alik Sarkisian has been retained as the school’s diving coach, meaning that the on-deck staff has now grown to 3 for the swimming & diving programs.
Swimstrongandlong – please stop spamming the comments section with the same comment over and over again. Thanks.
Seems like schools are being left with totally new coaching staff (Boise, Auburn, TCU) I wonder if this will halt their momentum because if I recall correctly Boise had been doing some great things. This has been such a crazy off season!
There’s some interesting research that could be done there, we might do it. It SEEMS like brands rule in swimming and tend to survive coaching changes. But, maybe later this summer we could try and apply some numbers to it.
Braden, this may be some good background information for you…
“…athletic directors should note that the impact of a new head coach appears very small overall, especially in comparison to the program’s previous success and how the previous coach left the position. Perhaps this is the most revealing aspect of this research – that coaching changes do not have much practical impact on conference wins, oftentimes less than one additional win per year. Thus, expecting a new head coach to make significant progress without changing other environmental variables may be a feckless exercise.”
http://csri-jiia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/RA_2017_07.pdf
That’s kind of what I would have suspected. It takes years and years for a coach and school to build a brand together – Eddie Reese and Texas are known for churning out 100/200/500 free guys like a factory, but if Eddie went off to, say, TCU, they wouldn’t magically become that in a year or two. Guys like Dave Salo, Dave Durden, Gregg Troy, Mike Bottom and more recently Braden Holloway all took a few years to mold their teams into their image. That’s kind of what makes what Todd Desorbo did at Virginia this year or Greg Rhodenbaugh at Mizzou a few years ago (best NCAA finish in school history his first year on the job) so striking.
JP, I too noticed the striking results of Missouri due to Greg Rhodenbaugh. I think he is an underrated coach.
Bringing the conversation back to this article, and considering Jeremy inherited a champion winning team at Boise St., how long do you think it will take for Jeremy and Meghan to turn Northwestern into a top 3 team in the B1G10?
I honestly don’t think they ever will be – at least not in the foreseeable future. They were very good for a half-decade period but that was because they had Grevers (in state), Bubolz (Wisconsin so close to in state), Alexandrov (in state), plus a transfer from Washington in Bruno Barbic for a year – even those years they were terribly shallow otherwise.
They have been scraping the bottom of the barrel the past few years though – they had an OK recruiting class last year that got no better (overall the whole team only had 9 scoring swims at Big 10s, and 6 of those were C finals), but the year before they had literally no freshmen. They are… Read more »
If Johnson et. al., are to be believed – “…the more success the program had prior to a new coach, the fewer conference wins it would have after the coaching change relative to before the coaching change.” – then your prediction maybe carries less weight as NW was mid to lower-pack team (they can only go up from here). If the swimmers want and believe they can get better, then Jeremy (who is also an underrated coach) has the possibility of turning the program around even though it will be an uphill battle.
NU is in an interesting situation. A top rated “Ivy League” school in a major power conference. Keep in mind the undergrad enrollment is about 6,000 students…One key positive is the major revenue programs (Football & Basketball) are headed in the right direction and big time facility upgrades are under way. The NFL quality on-campus training center is physically attached to the pool and includes dining , locker room and meeting facilities for the swim teams. This will be a recruiting bonus, but still up the the new coaches to capitalize on this and find the right student athlete mix.
Yeah, it really is a good school in a good location. The pool is probably getting a little old compared to the standards of the best out there, but it is still a nice facility. And you’re right, the revenue sports have really been trending consistently upward the past decade.
Now it’s time for Univetsity of Illinois to make the change to their swimming program. Sue Novitsky’s time as head coach has long expired. Swimmer performance is unacceptable. Injuries are common and the team is unhappy. The state of Illinois should rule the B1G conference!!
Seems like a logical choice. It’ll be fun watching NW climb the ranks of the B1G!