GAINESVILLE, Fla. - University of Florida head swimming coach Gregg Troy was named the head coach of the 2012 U.S. Olympic Men’s Swimming Team, USA Swimming and the U.S. Olympic Committee announced Wednesday. Troy joins former Gator track and field coach Jimmy Carnes (1980) as the only two head coaches in school history to be the head coach of a U.S. Olympic National Team.
"It is a tremendous honor for Coach Troy to be selected as the head coach of the 2012 Olympic Team,” UF athletics director Jeremy Foley said. “We are very proud of our Gator Olympic tradition and we look forward to him carrying that on. The United States Olympic Committee could not have made a finer choice."
The selection as head coach comes just two weeks after USA Swimming named Troy its 2010 Coach of the Year, his fourth Coach of the Year honor in the last nine months. This past summer at the 2010 Pan Pacific Championships, the world’s largest international meet of 2010, Troy coached the U.S. men’s squad to a meet-high 21 total medals, helping the Americans capture the Championship Team trophy with 47 medals in all (nearly double the medal count of second-place Australia).
“It’s certainly a tremendous honor any time you have the opportunity to represent your country,” Troy said. “If you ask any young swimmer what their goal is, they’ll all tell you it’s to go to the Olympics. I think coaches are no different. I’m fortunate to have an athletics department at Florida that makes that (coaching) available to me, as well as a tremendous coaching staff that I work with here that can help me go forward towards London.”
Embarking on his fifth Olympic coaching appointment and his third with the United States, the 33-year coaching veteran made his Olympic debut in 1988 as an assistant coach with Guam in Seoul, South Korea, before becoming head coach of the Thailand National Team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Troy joined the U.S. squad as an assistant coach for the women at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, with his last stint as an Olympic coach being the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where the coaching veteran served as an assistant coach for the men’s U.S. National Team. As a part of the 2008 squad, Troy helped coached the U.S. to 11 world records and 31 medals, accounting for nearly one-third of the total U.S. medals won.
Troy is in the midst of his 13th season at the University of Florida, where he currently has both the men’s (2-2, 2-0 SEC) and women’s (2-3, 0-1 SEC) squads ranked No. 4 in the country. Last season, the Sarasota, Fla., native helped the Gators bring home the 2010 women’s swimming and diving NCAA championship, their first since 1982. On the men’s side, Troy led UF to its 11th consecutive top-10 finish, while scoring a school-record 364 points at the NCAA Championships.
Carnes, UF’s only other U.S. Olympic head coach, served as the head track and field coach at the University of Florida from 1965-76, where he directed the Gators to 15 top-three finishes at the Southeastern Conference Indoor and Outdoor Championships combined, including SEC indoor championships in each of his final two seasons as the program’s head coach. Carnes later went on to a distinguished career as a key contributor and advocate for track and field on the national and international level, and was recently inducted into the USA Track and Field’s National Hall of Fame.
