On Monday morning, Marquette University announced that they have hired Joel Rollings to be the first head coach in the history of the women's swimming team.

Let's go to the press release, first for quotes from Athletic Director Mike Broeker....

And now Rollings himself.....

As it turns out, the national search that was announced in May when the team was announced landed about 15 blocks away from the McGuire Center. Rollings has been the head coach at Milwaukee School of Engineering, and that's particularly relevant here because he was the first coach in that program's history. The Raiders were tabbed as the most improved team in all of NCAA Division 3 this past season, and he coached two individual conference champions in 2024-25 alongside eight total all conference finishes.

Rollings also had a one year run on staff at Wisconsin-Milwaukee before that, and that was after 12 years as the head coach at Wisconsin-Whitewater. He was a three-time conference coach of the year with the Warhawks and coached two NCAA champions, 56 conference champions, 13 individual All-Americans, and three All-American relay teams, all at the Division 3 level.

In short, it would seem that Rollings' credentials as a swim coach, particularly in situations with limited resources, are impeccable, even if those championship numbers are for co-ed teams and now he'll only be coaching a women's team. Seeing as Marquette isn't offering scholarships for track & field or cross country starting this school year, it certainly seems like Rollings is going to be working with something of a smaller budget at MU.

One thing that we have to note is that Rollings is being hired now, in mid-September, after Marquette's original announcement of the swim team said that they would begin competition in the current 2025-26 school year. As I wrote about on Monday morning in an article that was scheduled to publish literally one minute after Marquette tweeted out the news of the hire, it is very clear that MU is not going to have women in the pool in competition this year. Practices are spooling up right now for competition to begin in October, and the fact of the matter is that Rollings doesn't have a team. I don't know exactly what the hold up is/was that caused MU to flub the timeline on their original announcement, but there was clearly something throwing a wrench in the works. Is it the scholarship issue? Was it MU starting a coaching search a couple of months after the swimming season ended so no one was interested in moving, which is how you get Marquette hiring a guy that lives in Whitefish Bay? Was part of the problem the fact that Marquette isn't going to have a diving side of the program and thus it will be pretty much impossible for the Golden Eagles to ever win a Big East championship in swimming & diving as a combination sport?

I don't know, but something got in the way and now, instead of starting right now as previously announced, the press release on Rollings' hire says that competition for the women's swim team will begin in the 2026-27 school year. I'd say that at least gives Rollings a chance to recruit for his team, but if I understand the NCAA recruiting timeline properly, we're about two months away from those Class of 2026 recruits being able to sign letters of intent. We'll see what happens, I guess?