University of Southern Indiana
NCAA DII • OVC
Date: February 24, 2026
Would Recommend
Tags
Coach Kainer is not the type of coach every swimmer should want. I had multiple club coaches who developed athletes far better than anything I experienced here and coaches that meant more and did more for me than Coach Kainer ever will. Coach Kainer is very good at selling a big, beautiful vision during recruiting visits. You’re told you’ll grow, flourish, and be part of something special. The reality is very different. Many swimmers improve their freshman year because you are coming off of high school swimming. After that, progression often plateaus. The times used in recruiting pitches don’t reflect the broader pattern. Do your own research. Look at performance trajectories across four years, not just highlight improvements. Very very few swimmers get better under Coach Kainer. The “growing pains” of this program are severely understated. This program has become a team across the 4 years it has existed to where you can't trust your teammates, coaches, or captains as they are consistently talking behind others backs. Drama exist yes, but what this team has is like no other, and not in a good way and the coaches contribute to it rather than stopping it. Coach Kainer will lie to you and deceive you. He will never admit and will always create some other excuse but he is the reason this team will never have a strong foundation. He can have as of his "minions" attempt to ratio the 1 star reviews on here but the proof is in the pudding that this is a coach that is destined to fail you and your expectations. Do not come here. Do not come here thinking you will make a difference, do not come here after reading these comments and thinking that your experience will be different, do not come here just because Coach Kainer has sold you on the idea that you can do all these great things. The reality of almost everyone coming out of this program is that they are so excited to get away from Coach Kainer. Swimmers are graduating early to leave Coach Kainer but to also still have some dignity left. All I have learned from this program is that you should never fully trust people and that others will use their own ambitions against their own teammates. As a swimmer on the team you are expected to never voice concerns. By his mindset, you should never have something to complain about and if you do you should just leave and go to a different program. When concerns are raised, they are often reframed as negativity or personal weakness. The message is essentially: if you don’t like it, leave. Over time, that creates silence. People stop speaking up. Nobody on the team voices concerns because he threatens you if you do and has scared everyone even captains into speaking up. To say "do the work and everything will be great" is like an arrow in the foot to anyone that has played a sport ever. Coach Kainer himself also repeats that he wants you to not complain and just trust the process. But it is very hard to trust someone that has done nothing to gain your trust over all the years. Feedback is minimal. At meets and practices, race analysis is often reduced to “How did that feel?” without detailed breakdown or technical adjustment which if you know as a swimmer means that he didn't watch your race and just wants you to say something so he can add in some comment. I heard him multiple times at practice say one thing he probably heard from a social media video and then he would just tell everyone the same thing. There is little individualized coaching. Everyone is expected to fit the same mold rather than being coached according to their strengths and style. His personality towards the woman's team is so awkward. He gets so uncomfortable and has made disgusting gestures that really should have been reported to a higher up. For a coach that brags about that he knows what he is doing because he has been a coach for 15 years, the team shouldn't have this many issues. And that even goes with academic issues. The first 3 years of the program was littered with swimmers that Coach Kainer recruited based purely off of swim times and considered no high school academic parts. The team lost so many people because Coach Kainer, who you would think knew after 15 years how to recruit people for a team, was so time-wise hungry to just have fast people and instead made the team suffer with academics the first semester. After those people would be kicked off for academic reasons the team GPA would go back to normal, but it was almost consistently for 3 years 3-5 people being kicked off for academics which hurt the team so much. Coach Kainer prioritized swim times over long-term academic fit, which contributed to repeated academic eligibility issues in early years of the program. That instability affected team morale and continuity and he showed no remorse. For a coach who emphasizes how much experience and years in the profession he has, the number of persistent cultural and developmental issues is concerning. If you are a STEM major coming here, don't expect him to be flexible or to help you. He will complain and complain about your class schedule, your labs, clinical, and anything else that you need for your education but will do the bare minimum to help you. And if you go to someone else for help, he will say that you are breaking his triangle of trust, and that is an insane thing to say for someone that was a communication major and never had to take any challenging classes ever. Do not rely solely on social media or recruiting visits for this program or this coach. Speak privately with former athletes. The host, which are usually only freshman because they are so new at the time and haven't gone through all years, are required in the recruiting visits to only say good things. We are not allowed to be honest. Look at four-year improvement data. Make your decision based on evidence, not promises. Most importantly, understand that your experience is unlikely to be “different” simply because you believe you will work harder, go faster times or care more. Many athletes came in believing that and no carry the severe regret of that decision.