Seton Hall University
ACHA M2 • CSCHC
Date: April 17, 2024
Would Recommend
Derek is a good guy with a nice family who overall does care for his athletes. He is understanding about athlete's mental health, flexible when it comes to class schedules, and supportive of professional development. Many people on the team are active members of the campus community because unlike at many other places, Derek allows you to be a full-time athlete, student, and person. With that being said, Derek is not a good coach and often a difficult person to work with. While I got along with Derek, I know others who continuously clashed with him. He is scattered in everything from the way he writes practices, to his inability to get an itinerary out on time, to his communication. He is not a detail-oriented coach, and once he identifies something wrong with your stroke, he repeats it for many years. He rarely comes up with an original idea for practice, and week after week, the team finds themselves doing the same things, on the same intervals, on the same day. Derek does not recruit intelligently, and the quality and number of recruits has decreased significantly since I joined in 2019. Recruiting is unbalanced, resulting in huge sprint and stroke groups (leading to frustratingly crowded practices) while IM and distance swimmers often have lanes completely to themselves. Worst of all, Derek treats full-time coaching like a part-time job. He struggles with childcare more than you can imagine. He routinely misses practices for personal issues, and has little to no availability during school hours. Swimmers are expected to work around their busy schedules to accommodate his limited availability- trying to schedule a meeting with him is impossible, and half the time he ends up cancelling it anyways. It is too bad that Derek is the head coach of this team, because the school is a great place filled with great people and supportive teammates. Admin allows these issue to persist, in part because the team practices at times when no one else is in the rec (and thus issues are not recognized), but also because they just don't care. Swimming is clearly a low-revenue sport not worth their time or effort, no matter the show of support they put on.