The University of Texas’s appeal as a destination for world-class swimmers was enhanced in the final push to the Paris Olympics.
It was early June, 53 days before the start of the Summer Games, and lanes two, three, and four at the outdoor pool at the Lee and Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center were occupied, respectively, by reigning Olympic champion Chase Kalisz, from outside Baltimore; world champion Hubert Kós, of Hungary; and Frenchman Leon Marchand, who eclipsed the last of Michael Phelps’s world records in 2023.
In the outside lanes were Regan Smith, weeks away from reclaiming a world record in the 100-meter backstroke at the U.S. trials, and two others who would qualify for Paris.
Erik Posegay, the new associate head coach of the UT men’s swim team, was overseeing it all. Bob Bowman, the new men’s coach and director of swimming and diving at the school, was in a meeting for head coaches to discuss, among other items, the Longhorns’ brand as they join the Southeastern Conference.
That training group was two months removed from Tempe, Arizona, where Bowman, Kós, and Marchand led Arizona State to its first NCAA swim title in March. The recent arrivals worked independently from the men and women swimming for UT or its parallel club program, Longhorn Aquatics, under the eye of Forty Acres legend Eddie Reese, the most successful coach in the history of collegiate swimming, who retired at the end of June after 46 years in charge of the program. That crew will send three men, three women, and UT women’s head coach Carol Capitani—a Team USA assistant coach—to Paris.
Count the past and present UT students, incoming transfers, and those who are following Bowman to Austin to compete professionally as members of the Longhorn Aquatics club, and there are fifteen swimmers with connections to UT competing in Paris. “You’ve got so many medalists here—international medalists and national champions,” Bowman said that day in early June. “You’ve got the fastest four hundred IM [individual medley] swimmer of all time [Marchand], who happens to be the best swimmer in the world right now. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff happening.”
Just as tourists in Austin make the pilgrimage to Barton Springs for a selfie, gold medalists and Olympic hopefuls continue to find their way to the Jamail Center.
The men’s 400-meter individual medley will be contested July 28, day three of the Paris Olympics, and its medal podium could be as powerful an illustration as any of UT’s central place in the sport, with leadership of the aquatics program going from Reese, who won a record fifteen NCAA titles, to Bowman, who developed Phelps into a champion whom ESPN recently named the greatest athlete of the twenty-first century.
The 400 IM requires shifting from butterfly to backstroke to breaststroke to freestyle. It’s swimming’s version of the decathlon, and Kalisz, the reigning gold medalist, was fourteen when he began training under Bowman in Baltimore, alongside Phelps. All would make their way to Arizona State, where Bowman became coach in 2015. In 2020, Marchand emailed Bowman about coming to Tempe. At last summer’s world championships in Japan, two years into his Sun Devil career, the Frenchman shaved more than a second off the sport’s longest-standing men’s world record in long course meters, Phelps’s 2008 mark in the 400 IM. Marchand’s new record stands at 4 minutes, 2.50 seconds.
Marchand was more than four seconds ahead of silver medalist Carson Foster at worlds. Foster, a former UT swimmer who trained under Reese and Wyatt Collins through this year’s U.S. Olympic Team Trials, will continue training under Bowman in Austin after the 2024 Summer Games. Early next year, Marchand will join them at UT to begin training for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics (like Foster, Marchand is a pro and will swim for Longhorn Aquatics, which also encompasses elite amateurs). “I don’t think there is any question—Bob is the best coach in the world for the four hundred IM,” said Foster, eighth on the event’s all-time list, which has Bowman products at numbers one, two, and four. “To be able to join forces with him, and get to train with the guys he’s coaching now, that is going to be special.”
For Foster, the transition from training under Reese to working with Bowman could be jarring. Capitani likened the two coaches’ styles to “North Pole versus South Pole.
“Training-wise, they’re not dissimilar,” she added. “Eddie’s a savant; Bob’s a little more cerebral. . . . Eddie doesn’t write anything down, just takes everything out of his head. Bob is a meticulous planner, but if you said, ‘Write a practice for a four hundred freestyler on day x,’ their practices would look very similar.”
Sure enough, an hour after Capitani made those comments at a late-June media opportunity, Shaine Casas, a Longhorn Aquatics swimmer headed to Paris, inquired about that afternoon’s workout. Reese dipped into a well of experience that has developed almost three dozen Olympians and outlined an interval workout off the top of his head. Meanwhile, Drew Kibler, a member of Team USA’s 4×200 freestyle relay team who trains with Bowman, knew exactly what his coach would have him doing weeks down the road, at U.S. training camps in North Carolina and Croatia, before heading to Paris. “We broke down day by day, session by session, I guess the next month and a half of training,” Kibler said. “And that’s how we proceed, without Bob being directly with us.”
Bowman was headed to Toulouse, France, to work with Marchand and Kós (the Hungarian who has announced his transfer from ASU to UT). Bowman will work the Olympics on the French national team’s coaching staff, minimizing distractions for Marchand in the same way he did for Phelps as a member of four U.S. coaching staffs.
In addition to the 400 IM, Marchand is the reigning world champion in the 200 IM and 200 butterfly. He’s also a threat in the 200 breaststroke. Marchand is being hyped as the face of the Paris Olympics, and French was the dominant tongue on press row at the NCAA championships.
“I love change,” said Bowman, whose last four Olympic cycles with Phelps had the two based first in Baltimore, then at the University of Michigan, then back in Baltimore and finally at Arizona State. “I’m a pretty good multitasker. I’ve always had the Olympics foremost. Whatever decisions I had to make here, I tried to make the ones that I just had to do for the Texas team right away. Anything that I can push off until August, I’ve pushed off.”
Bowman, who is 59, has thrived wherever the locale. Reese, who just turned 83 and will watch the Paris Olympics from his home in Austin after serving on U.S. coaching staffs from 1988 through 2012, supplied the Longhorns with a most distinguished stability.
Reese coached men’s swimming at UT for 46 seasons. All but the first produced a conference championship. In addition to the fifteen national championship teams Reese helmed, UT was runner-up thirteen times. He developed nearly three dozen Olympians who have totaled 44 gold medals, including Aaron Peirsol, the best backstroker ever, and NBC analyst Rowdy Gaines, back when Reese was coaching Auburn. “I don’t want to say that Eddie is laid-back, but he’s very gentle in the way he shows his emotions,” Gaines said. Bowman, he went on, “isn’t going to get in your face, but he’s a little more intense. That’s tempered by his love for the sport, a common bond among the two.”
Reese, born and raised in Daytona Beach, swam for the University of Florida. Bowman, who grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, swam for Florida State. In a UT media release announcing Bowman’s hire, Reese said, “Bob is the perfect choice for this job, and I will teach him to hunt and fish, too.” It was an inside joke. Bowman’s interests run more toward thoroughbred racing and classical music. When it comes to Texas culture, he is more Van Cliburn, the Cold War piano prodigy from East Texas, than Townes Van Zandt, who gave us “Pancho and Lefty.”
Reese’s seat-of-the-pants coaching style might have served him equally well calling football plays. Bowman leaves nothing to chance. When he moved to Austin this spring, he chose temporary housing based on its ease of access to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport during an Olympic year.
Bowman’s distinctions include being named Coach of the Year a record five times by the American Swimming Coaches Association. His talent for maximizing potential is best seen, of course, in Phelps, who won 23 gold medals. The previous record was 9. He was the youngest male athlete to set a world record in a stopwatch sport. In that ESPN listing of twenty-first-century greatness, experts chose him above Serena Williams, Lionel Messi, and Usain Bolt.
If there’s a Mount Rushmore of UT coaches, meanwhile, Reese belongs alongside the likes of Darrell K. Royal, Clint Gustafson, and an assortment of fourth possibilities. He’s done it all with a self-deprecating touch. “I’d say most of the time, I’m ten percent of their equation for success,” Reese said in June after the U.S. trials. “I’m about five percent of Shaine’s.”
That would be Shaine Casas, who grew up in McAllen, in South Texas, and competed collegiately for Texas A&M but flashed a “Hook ’em” gesture after finishing second to Foster in the 200 IM at the U.S. trials. Others who qualified for Paris include Luke Hobson, a rising UT senior who will compete in the 200 freestyle and 4×200 freestyle relay, and David Johnston of Dallas, who took a redshirt year at UT to train in California and became the final U.S. qualifier at the trials with a late charge in the 1,500 freestyle.
The Paris-bound professionals who migrated with Bowman from Tempe to Austin include Regan Smith, a Minnesota native who has held the world record in both backstrokes and is also a medal threat in the 200 butterfly, and Paige Madden, who would be America’s best in the 400 and 800 freestyles if not for Katie Ledecky. Others remained in Tempe with remote input from Bowman, most notably Simone Manuel, who grew up just outside Houston in Sugar Land and became the first Black female swimmer to win an individual gold medal, in 2016, but was burned out by the time the COVID-postponed Tokyo Olympics were held in 2021. She returned this year to win the 50 freestyle at the trials.
For every swimmer who retires or seeks greener grass after these Olympics, there will likely be another who accepts a UT scholarship or moves to Austin to train as a pro under Bowman. Aaron Shackell, who will turn twenty in September, won the 400 freestyle at the U.S. trials. He began last school year at the University of California, Berkeley but will begin the next at UT, with plenty of NCAA eligibility remaining. In late June, his brother, Andrew, another gifted swimmer who still has one more year of high school in Carmel, Indiana, rescinded his commitment to Cal and announced his plans to attend UT.
Bowman’s hire and all of that roster movement might never have occurred if the Pac-12 Conference hadn’t been stripped bare by NCAA conference realignment. In Tempe, the coach had built a national championship team, but Arizona State was left on a competitive island when the Pac-12’s traditional aquatics powers—UCLA, USC, Stanford, and Cal—left for the Big Ten and the ACC. By the time ASU found a new home in the Big 12, that conference had already lost Texas to the SEC. That left Bowman open to UT athletic director Chris Del Conte’s hiring overtures. “Nobody knew Bob was going to be hired but Bob and Del Conte,” Reese said. “I was surprised, because I didn’t think he’d leave [Tempe].”
Bowman called UT “a great destination if you want to swim at the top level. We have everything that you could possibly want. We have great coaching. We have facilities that are unmatched. You’re not going to find a better training environment than what we have here.”
Amid conference shuffles and the increasing professionalization of major football and basketball programs, some NCAA observers have concerns that nonrevenue sports will eventually die out at the Division I level. In Bowman, UT acquired an industry leader experienced in lobbying the international swimming powers that be on matters ranging from the Olympic schedule to illegal doping to swimsuit technology that’s gone too far. “In this country, our greatest asset for Olympic sports is the university system,” Bowman said. “We don’t have government training centers like Australia or wherever. These are our training centers. It’s like [Del Conte] said: we’re a brand amplifier.”
Capitani, the UT women’s coach, offered her view of the state of Longhorn swimming with an understatement of Olympic proportions: “We were equipped to keep it prominent before Bob came, but Bob helps that as we move forward. We’ll keep ourselves relevant.”
