Rutgers Hires Three-Time NCAA Champion Tracy Menzel as New Assistant

The Rutgers women’s swimming & diving team has announced the hiring of Tracy Menzel as the program’s new swimming assistant, serving under head coach Phil Spiniello.

This is Menzel’s first official coaching job at the NCAA level, though she has plenty of credentials as an athlete. She swam collegiately for Division III Kenyon College until 2009, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude, meaning that her GPA was above a 3.70.

While attaining that sparkling academic profile, she also won three NCAA Division III event championships as a breaststroker, including the 2007 and 2009 titles in the 100 yard breaststroke. That was a part of 16 career All-America honors.

Menzel was nominated as a finalist for the NCAA Woman of the Year honor in 2009  and then spent three years working with Teach for America in Allen, Texas, before returning to college swimming. Specifically, she has been working with 2014 NCAA team runner-ups Cal in several different capacities, including at their summer swim camps, as a graduate manager, and as an “academic coach” in the athletic study center.

She’s also spent the last 18 months as the head coach of the Bentley School, where in her first season the team broke 6 records and qualified their first athletes for California’s North Coast Section high school championship meet for the first time in four years.

While this will be Menzel’s first formal trip into college coaching, she has been around one of the country’s great programs for the last two years, and has exhibited high levels of success the classroom and the pool. That should give her some weight in recruiting, at least, as Rutgers looks to build on the success of last season.

In 2013-2014, the Scarlet Knights sent two athletes, senior diver Nicole Scott and sophomore swimmer Joanna Wu, to the NCAA Championships. This was the first time they’d achieved such a feat since 2008.

Menzel is the 3rd different woman to fill Rutgers’ only full-time assistant position in 3 seasons. After the 2012-2013 season, Katie Robinson was hired away to become the head coach at Tulane, and Lauren O’Donnell took over and then left after one season, for still publicly unexplained reasons.