By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
The head coach position of the women’s team at Texas A&M is one of the biggest swimming & diving coaching gigs open this off-season, and any conversation on a replacement relied, in part, on who filled another crucial role at the university: Director of Athletics.
According to news broken Wednesday by Brent Zwerneman of the Houston Chronicle, Nebraska AD Trev Alberts is the man who will take over the job. Alberts makes the move just four months after signing a new contract to stay at Nebraska through 2031 that more-than-doubled his salary to $1.7 million per year.
In past roles, Alberts has been a supporter of swimming, notably adding a men’s swimming and diving program at Nebraska-Omaha in his final year there (though the team didn’t swim its first meet until he had left for Nebraska-Lincoln, the more prominent of the two state schools). He eliminated football and wrestling programs, even as a former All-American player at Nebraska who had a brief career in the NFL.
That makes him one of the few athletics directors that has added a men’s Division I swimming and diving program in the last three decades, and he did so at the expense of football – a rare cause in modern athletics.
The last time Texas A&M hired an athletics director from Nebraska, he came in with a very different reputation. Bill Byrne was responsible for cutting the men’s and women’s swimming programs at Oregon in the 1980s and then the men’s program at Nebraska in 2001.
Past performance does not always represent future results, though: Olympic sports programs, including especially the women’s swimming & diving program, improved dramatically during his tenure leading the department until his retirement in 2012, though those programs were in a pretty stable position, with Steve Bultman being hired three years before Byrne arrived and Jay Holmes being hired 15 years before he arrived. Byrne wound up not having to make any head coaching hires for either swimming program (though they did hire a new diving coach Jay Lerew, who has built one of the best diving programs in the country) during his run.
Alberts is a bit of an anomaly in his line of work: he is a former football player who has eliminated a football program, again one of the few to do so, and was then hired by a football-mad school from where he graduated, and then left for another football-mad school and former rival that spends as much on its football program as any college in the country.
In spite of his big moves, an internal UNO memo released last year says that Alberts financially mis-managed the department, leaving it in the red, but that won’t likely be a problem at Texas A&M, which has a seemingly-endless supply of donor funds to dip into these days.
What does this mean for the future of the head coaching position at Texas A&M? Alberts has not had to hire a head swim coach in his career. Todd Samland was at UNO for 25 years before resigning in September 2022, and Pablo Morales has been the head coach at Nebraska since 2021.
Albert’s history seems to mean that he is going to make the *calculated* decision – a middle-of-the-road hire versus going after the biggest name he can find. My guess is that the hire will be a top assistant from a rising program like Notre Dame or Arizona State or Wisconsin or Cal, someone who will grow into the position and reinject some energy into a team that has a lot of talent, but that hasn’t been in the top 10 in years after a run of top four positions, but someone who won’t break the bank immediately.
SwimSwam: Texas A&M Hires New AD Trev Alberts, Who Added Swimming and Cut Football in Omaha
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