T&T-born Olympic gold medal swimmer, Anthony Nesty has been named head swim coach for the University of Florida. This after the university opted to combined both their men and women swimming & diving programmes into one.
The announcement also comes shortly after the announcement that the University of Florida women’s head coach Jeff Poppell would be leaving to take over as head coach of the University of South Carolina.
Born in T&T, Nesty and his family emigrated to Suriname in his infancy, and he took up swimming as a child.
After showing promise as a sprinter, he enrolled at the famed Bolles School in Jacksonville, where he trained under Gregg Troy — who spent two decades at Bolles — in the run-up to the 1988 Summer Olympics.
Nesty swam for Suriname in Seoul and won his nation’s first Olympic medal (and still its only Olympic gold medal) by beating out American favourite Matt Biondi by one one-hundredth of a second in the 100-meter butterfly.
Nesty, a 1994 UF graduate and UF Hall of Fame Inductee, is one of the most decorated swimmers in Gators history and has achieved immense success at the international level as a competitor and coach.
He also won a bronze medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and his pair of medals still stands as the country’s only Olympic hardware.
Overall, Nesty has coached in three different Olympics and was recognised as Suriname’s flag bearer at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.
Nesty has spent the last three seasons as the Florida men’s head coach, and the Olympic champion and UF standout has been on the Florida staff for the last 23 years.
Florida was a combined programme under longtime coach Troy, who retired from collegiate coaching in spring 2018 following the 2017-18 NCAA season.
Following Troy’s departure, the programme split, and former Florida associate head coaches Nesty and Poppell were tapped to lead the men’s and women’s programs as head coaches, respectively.
The Florida men and women each had several strong seasons since Troy’s departure.
Nesty helped the Florida men to a third-place finish at 2021 NCAAs, up from sixth in 2019 and fifth in 2018 (Caeleb Dressel‘s senior year). He’s continued the Florida men’s SEC dominance, extending their conference win streak through to 2021– no other team has won since 2013.
In the last couple of seasons, Kieran Smith and Bobby Finke have set American records, and the Gator men have been a national force, also excelling in sprints even after Dressel’s graduation.
Poppell, meanwhile, pushed the Florida women from a scoreless NCAAs in 2017, their first scoreless NCAAs in history, up to 17th place in 2021 with 84.5 points. Florida jumped from seventh at 2018 SECs, the season before Poppell took over the newly split women’s program, to SEC runners-up in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
With Florida becoming a combined programme again, that leaves Texas A&M and Tennessee (unofficially, as Matt Kredich is the head coach of the men and women but coaches dedicate their time mostly to either the men or women) as the only teams to split by gender in the SEC (Arkansas and Vanderbilt only have women’s teams).