Dan Carrington, formerly an associate head coach at Penn State, has been hired as an assistant coach at UNLV, the school announced on Thursday.
“We are excited to welcome Dan to the Rebel family,” said new UNLV head swimming & diving coach Pat Ota. “Dan brings a wealth of knowledge, coaching great athletes and working with Power-4 programs. Dan’s commitment to the student-athletes and passion for their success is unmatched and they will greatly benefit from that.”
This means Carrington won’t be retained by new Penn State head coach Hollie Bonewit-Cron.
Carrington and Bonewit-Cron overlapped briefly when the latter took over as head coach at Miami University in Ohio. After the school originally announced that Carrington would remain on staff, he wound up on the Florida State coaching staff that season instead.
Carrington spent the last two seasons as associate head coach at Penn State, but head coach Tim Murphy did not have his contract renewed after being placed on a leave of absence.
Prior to that he spent six years at Florida State, two at Miami (Ohio), three at Duke, and the 2009-2011 seasons as head coach at Southwestern University, a D3 school in Texas, where he produced the program’s first All-American. Before that was a first stop at Duke as a volunteer assistant from 2007-2008.
At Penn State, Carrington was primarily focused on the team’s distance group. That group included sophomore Morgan Moore who was the team’s 5th-best individual scorer at last year’s Big Ten Championships including a 15th-place finish in the 1650 free that was a 14-second improvement over her lifetime best coming into the season.
The Penn State women finished 9th out of 12 teams and the men were 7th out of 8 teams at last year’s conference championship.
At Florida State, he served as the program’s recruiting coordinator, bringing in the 8th-ranked women’s class in the 2018-2019 season nationally.
Carrington’s hiring refills the UNLV coaching staff under Ota’s new tenure. Ota was promoted in the offseason after 8 years on staff, including most recently as an associate head coach. UNLV’s prior head coach Ben Loorz was hired as the new head coach at the University of Arizona in May.
Ota retained assistant coaches Julia Fehervari and Pieter Ritz and is also expected to hire Brynn Sproul as the Director of Operations.
In 2011, Carrington earned the ASCA Award of Excellence, which recognizes coaches who coach a swimmer to a top-eight finish at one or several USA national championships.
Carrington earned his bachelor’s degree from Ball State in 2002. He and his wife, Kim, have two daughters, Grace and Liana.
Congrats Dan. All around class act!
Smh. Wonder why UNLV didn’t hire Ron Aitken of the sandpipers as an assistant coach. Kinda a no brainer considering he wants to get into college coaching. Would have been a smart move by both the university and Ron I would think.
I think there were conversations (not sure if for assistant or head coach), but it would have needed to be a really creative collaboration, maybe one that would have been too complicated to make sense for UNLV.
Owners of big clubs like Sandpipers are making big, big money these days. It’s hard to lure those coaches away to college without getting very creative – or creating a situation where you’ve hired a coach whose priorities aren’t your athletes.
I don’t disagree. If he is making “big money” by being the owner/hc of Sandpipers, he could probably make “good money” by just being the owner of the team and promoting his assistant coach to HC. Then he could get his foot in the door with college coaching and make up some of the lost income. I think if he wants to be a college coach bad enough he needs to be creative himself.
Better rent in that profession.
Nice.