Swimming returns to Pacific with Olympic medalist as coach
After a 15-year absence, the athletic department will add women’s swimming as an intercollegiate athletic team with three-time Olympic medalist Claudia Kolb Thomas leading the way.
Thomas, former head coach at Stanford and at one time one of the world’s best swimmers, will lead the Boxer program. Thomas won a national championship with the Cardinal in 1980 and was named the National Collegiate Swimming Coach of the Year.
"To have a coach with Claudia’s experience as both a coach and competitor allows us to move quickly to build a quality program," Athletic Director Judy Sherman said.
Sherman said that the addition of the women’s swim team, which will begin competing in the 2003-04 season, allows Pacific to respond to growing interest in the sport by prospective students and supports the goals of the University and the NCAA to improve gender equity in intercollegiate athletics programs.
"When we looked at ways to improve our compliance with Title IX, it became clear rather quickly that swimming was the right sport to add," Sherman said.
Recruiting will be one of the first challenges, Thomas noted, because it is a first-year program and it is being added late in the recruiting season. "... But I am excited by those challenges and look forward to what the coming months bring," she said.
"Being a first year coach at Pacific, I hope that our athletes will be as excited as I am about being the pioneers of a new program," Thomas said. "I think we will have a great time in getting things in place for the success of Pacific swimming both now and in the future."
As a competitor, Thomas won two golds and claimed Olympic records for the U.S. in the 200-meter and 400-meter individual medleys at the 1968 summer games in Mexico City. Four years earlier at the Olympics she won an individual silver medal in the 200-meter breaststroke.
Thomas also won three gold medals and a silver at the 1967 Pan-American
Games, the same year that she was recognized as the world Swimmer of
the Year.
During her athletic career, Thomas held 23 world records and won 25 national
championships in nearly every aquatic discipline.
Men’s swimming will be offered as a club sport, and could be elevated to varsity
status in the future. The Boxer swimming team will compete in the winter, and
will conduct practices and home events at the Forest Grove Aquatic Center,
located adjacent to the Pacific Athletic Center, Pacific’s main athletic facility.
Swimming is sponsored by the Northwest Conference and Pacific’s addition brings
the total number of women’s programs in the conference to eight.