Hargis Adds Veteran Aussie, Bobby Folan, to Coaching Staff
7/15/2016 12:00:00 AM | Swimming & Diving
PITTSBURGH – John Hargis added some international experience to his Pitt coaching staff with the recent hire of assistant swimming coach Bobby Folan, a native of Australia with nearly a decade of collegiate coaching experience who most recently spent the last year as the interim head coach at UNLV.
Folan, a swimming letterman at Connecticut from 2001-05, will primarily work with the Pitt swimming sprinters while also serving as the Panthers’ director of international recruiting under Coach Hargis, who was hired as Pitt’s new head swimming & diving coach in April.
“Bobby will bring experiences beyond the United States. As an athlete from Australia, he’ll add an international component to our coaching staff that is vital in today’s atmosphere of our sport. He also brings experience as a head coach of a Division I program (UNLV),” Hargis said. “These experiences will be huge for the development of this program, and his overall philosophy will be exciting to have on staff. We want to welcome Bobby, his wife Louisa and his new baby boy Max into the Pitt family.”
After earning Big East Academic All-Star honors four consecutive years at UConn, Folan moved to Texas, where he spent three years as a volunteer assistant coach for the Longhorns. During his tenure there from 2006-08, Folan coached eight United States Olympians, including six gold-medal winners from the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
Folan then moved home to Australia, making stops at the Ginninderra Swim Club and the University of Sydney before returning to the United States in 2012 to become the head assistant coach at UNLV, where he was promoted to interim head coach in April 2015.
In his four seasons coaching the Rebels, Folan helped oversee 16 individual and 17 relay NCAA qualifiers, with four individuals and seven relay squads earning All-American honors under his tutelage. The UNLV men’s swimming team also won back-to-back Western Athletic Conference titles in 2014 and ’15 during Folan’s time with the program.
Folan owns a pair of bachelor’s degrees from the University of Connecticut in Business Administration and Mathematics, as well as a master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in Kinesiology with a specialization in Sport Management.
He is the fourth addition to Hargis' coaching staff, following the recent hires of Sarah Dunleavy, Jos Smith and Marc Christian​ as assistant swim coaches. Julian Krug will remain on the Pitt staff as the team's head diving coach.
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