BLOOMINGTON – It wasn’t by accident when Drew Johansen’s coaching career brought him to the Midwest.
First, from 1999-2001, he served as head diving coach at Illinois State. Three years later, he did a three-year term as a volunteer assistant at Ohio State. There had been head-coaching stops before then (Florida Atlantic in the ‘90s) and after (Duke, from 2007-13), but Johansen’s dip into Big Ten country was intentional.
Wedged between the two states where he worked was the one where he wanted to, at a university so successful in the sport it had only ever employed two diving coaches in its history. In 2013, Johansen became the third, and IU diving’s pattern of excellence has continued uninterrupted since.
“This has been the premier job in the country for 25 years,” Johansen said.
Arguably longer than that, given this summer’s Olympics in Paris will continue a streak that’s seen at least one IU diver, male or female, qualify for each Games since 1964. And at no point in the last 11 years, under Johansen’s guidance, have either expectations or results dipped from that bar.
These will be the fourth-consecutive games in which Johansen serves as Team USA’s head diving coach.
It is a testament both to his process and his results. Johansen — who works closely with his wife, Jenny, herself a two-time Olympic diver who also coached at North Carolina and N.C. State — is regarded as one of the best coaches, if not the best, in the sport. Team USA’s head role typically lands with the coach bringing the most athletes or claiming the most bids (events). For the last four cycles, including three at IU, that’s been Johansen.
“They’re all different,” Johansen said of his various experiences with the Games. “That’s what drives you to keep doing it, because it’s hard. …
“Coming off of the COVID Olympics, this is going to be a very different experience. So, for all the ones that are considered veterans of the Olympics because they dove in Tokyo, they’re going to experience something that they’ve never experienced before.”
Johansen has coached six Olympic divers across three Games just since arriving in Bloomington. Mostly recently, in Tokyo, Andrew Capobianco took silver in the 3-meter synchro alongside fellow Hoosier Michael Hixon, while Jessica Parratto medaled the same in the 10-meter synchro.
Parratto and Capobianco will be in Paris, as will fellow Hoosier Carson Tyler. Jenny Johansen will coach Parratto and serve on Team USA’s staff alongside her husband. The Johansens will be the first married couple to coach USA Diving together at a summer Games.
Johansen’s training works because he isn’t afraid to innovate.
He’s worked with Apple on video technology no other collegiate program had used before. He traveled to China to study dry-land training facilities, then opened one himself in a small building near downtown Bloomington. Inside the Counsilman-Billingsley Aquatic Center IU’s swimming and diving programs call home, hidden within the oversized pictures of program legends like Mark Spitz, Cynthia Potter and Mark Lenzi adorning the walls, are otherwise indistinguishable camera positions that allow Johansen to provide his athletes multiple angles of practice dives in real time, correcting mistakes before they linger long enough to become habits.
Culturally, Johansen pushes and coaches all his divers the same, from the Olympians down to the walk-ons, never neglecting an athlete because of their status. The message is simple: If you work hard in his process, you’ll get the benefits of it as best you’re able.
“You come in as a freshman here and you’re chasing whoever the top guy or girl on the team is, you’re trying to keep up with them,” Johansen said. “Inevitably, as the years go by, they catch them, and that’s why we have a lot of synchro success, because then, when they get to that equal level, they’re diving at a high level together. And then the older diver is working hard to fight off that young one coming up, and they see it every day in practice.”
Olympic sports work and think in quadrennials, four-year cycles where the new one begins even before the current one has concluded. Already, Johansen has an eye on 2028 — who’s coming up, who will retire, how to keep a program steeped in prestige competitive in a sport rapidly becoming synonymous with its home state (in total, nine swimmers and five divers from Team USA have Indiana ties).
Paris comes first.
“I’m more focused on their mental preparation than I have before,” he said. “I use a lot of video, we use a lot of different techniques that teach, first and foremost, the sport of diving, but all that is pretty much done. None of them are going to get any better at diving between now and when they dived at the Olympic Trials. What I’m trying to do is mentally prepare them to have the event not be bigger than them.”
Eventually, ’24 will become ’28. Some divers will retire. Johansen will tutor Indiana’s next generation.
IU has become, if not the gold standard in the Big Ten, then at least one of the very few seated at the top table. The Hoosiers have won the last three conference championships in men’s swimming and diving, and they took top honors on the women’s side last February for the first time since 2019.
Through collegiate competition — Big Ten meets, then NCAA meets, and eventually Olympic Trials — Johansen will hone the skills and technique of a new group, unabashedly attempting innovation along the way. Pointing at a shadow box sitting in his office stuffed with Big Ten championship rings, he said “we like these too,” referencing the extent to which daily excellence becomes annual excellence, which in turn becomes Olympic success.
If the rings aren’t enough, the pictures on those walls, staring down at IU’s swimmers and divers every day, of the champions and medalists who preceded them will provide all the reminder Johansen or his divers need of what’s expected in Bloomington. The coach who moved himself to the Midwest early in his career, hoping to follow Hobie Billingsley and Jeff Huber in maintaining the highest possible standard at IU, shows no sign of losing that level any time soon.
“It hangs on the walls here,” Johansen said. “It’s a culture that’s unspoken. It’s not felt as an expectation. It’s just a way to live your life in pursuit of excellence. And they find it in the classroom. They get to sharpen their edge in the collegiate competition series that they do every year. And then when the Olympics come around, they’re mentally stronger than most.”
Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Drew Johansen has continued IU’s incredible Olympic diving tradition
