Jonty Skinner,
Senior Contributor

Jonty Skinner has been involved in the sport of swimming for over forty-five years. He is a member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, and a member of the American Swimming Coaches Hall of Fame.

He capped an illustrious swimming career in August 1976 when he broke the World 100 meters freestyle record in Philadelphia by over half a second and held it for five years. In his swimming career he is credited with holding both the 50 and 100 meter world records in swimming.

At twenty-four, he entered coaching and has coached at all levels of the sport. In 1978 he started at the grass-roots level in Tuscaloosa, Alabama before winning junior and senior national club titles with San Jose Aquatics club in California in the 1980s. He worked as the head swimming coach at the University of Alabama in the early 1990s before coaching the Resident Swimming Team at the Olympic Training Center (OTC) in Colorado Springs.

During his coaching career, many of his swimmers won national and international titles, while his teams won Junior National titles and National Team Titles. At the 1996 Olympic Games, his swimmers won 9 Gold Medals and his best swimmer won four Gold Medals. In his career, his athletes won seventeen Gold Medals, and twenty three overall medals in Olympic competition.

In 2000, he stepped back from poolside, taking on the role of Director of Sports Performance and Technology at USA Swimming. That job involved overseeing all the testing, tracking and delivery of scientific concepts to the USA National Swimming Team. In 2008 he established a company called Athletic Intelligence Consulting to deliver information about how the brain impacted human performance.

Between 2009 and 2012 he worked for British Swimming as a World Class High Performance consultant before he went back to the pool deck as the Associate Head Coach at the University of Alabama in 2012. Between 2012 and 2019 he worked primarily with the sprinters and his swimmers won numerous SEC titles & 4 NCAA titles.

In 2019 he did a short stint in that same capacity at Indiana University before the Covid restrictions resulted in his ending his relationship with Indiana in early 2020. His swimmers won 4 Big Ten Titles and were actively involved in the team’s 4 relay Titles. In the fall of 2020 he coached the California Condors to a 6-0 record in the International Swim League season that culminated in winning the 2020 ISL team title for the first time. Throughout his career as a coach, he has been a leader in the use of performance science in day-to-day training. He has been instrumental in defining how science is delivered to the coaching population and helped develop the current USA Swimming approach to and use of scientific information. He has been extremely innovative in developing both tools and concepts used by

coaches in the sport and is considered one of the leading experts on athlete adaptation. He is also the leading expert in how the physical brain impacts performance and has written articles illustrating how Brain Training is the next paradigm in human performance. He is currently developing the concept of Brain Training for Swimming.