Pepperdine Voice Magazine

Winter 2008

Coach Nick Rodionoff

Just Get in the Water and Swim

When the school mascot is a wave, the swimming and diving team had better be good. Thanks to Pepperdine head coach Nick Rodionoff, it is.

Now in his 34th year at the University, Rodionoff has coached scores of athletes to achieve personal and Pepperdine bests. Thirty-six of his swimmers have been All-Americans, and under his direction Waves divers have claimed a conference championship title on 14 occasions.

Rodionoff's own accolades are distinguished and numerous. He is a member of the International Swimming and Diving Hall of Fame as well as the United States High School Coaches Hall of Fame. He was honored with the Fred A. Cady Memorial Coaches Award and named 2002 Diving Coach of the Year. He is also the only coach in the nation to have coached a national champion in both swimming and diving.

While attending Occidental College on a football scholarship, Rodionoff cultivated skills that took him off of the field and into the water. He served as head diving coach at UCLA before coming to Pepperdine and as a high school coach at Birmingham High. There his team won 31 League Championships and 10 consecutive Los Angeles City Championships.

His success as a coach all comes down to his relationships with his athletes. "He puts quality above quantity and really aims at developing the whole person," says Pepperdine senior swimmer Jaime Lyon. "He is one of the reasons I am the student and the athlete I have grown into today."

With his emphasis on quality in performance as well as players, the Pepperdine swimming and diving program keeps getting stronger. Last season's fourth place finish at the Pacific Coast Swimming Conference Championships marked the team's seventh consecutive Top 5 finish under Rodionoff. In the course of the meet, swimmers broke into the Top 5 all-time best times for Pepperdine women's swimming 12 times. In fact, in the past seven years, Rodionoff's swimmers have captured more than 65 of the 100 all-time fastest finishes in the history of women's swimming and diving at Pepperdine.

"Everything gets better every year," he says. "The school, the team, the incoming athletes; it's even easier to recruit." It seems Rodionoff himself has a way of making the difficult things easier. As senior distance swimmer Loriann Mark explains: "The best advice he has ever given me is, 'Just get in the water and swim.'"