Johnathan Jordan Hired as EIU’s 3rd Head Coach in 3 Seasons

Eastern Illinois has hired Johnathan Jordan as the program’s new head coach. He becomes the 9th head coach in program history, and the third in the last 3 seasons.

It is also Jordan’s third job this year.

Jordan was the head coach at Lincoln College for 7 years, but the school closed at the end of the 2021-2022 academic year – with the elimination of the swimming & diving program a byproduct of the school’s closure.

Then, in April, he took over as the head coach of the Bloomington-Normal YMCA Swim Team, about 30 minutes away. The USA Swimming/YMCA hybrid had about 85 swimmers at the beginning of the season.

Jordan has taken another new job, now at an NCAA Division I program in Charleston, Illinois, which is about 90 minutes southeast of Bloomington-Normal.

For the Panthers, Jordan replaces Tyler Donges, which the school “parted ways with” after just eight months on the job, citing an “in-depth review of the status of the program.” Donges took over for Evan Shodulko, who led the program for two seasons before leaving for the same job at Lewis University.

This is the second-straight season where the program has had to make a late-summer hire: Donges took over in September of 2021.

At the 2022 Summit League Championships, both the women’s team and the men’s team finished 6th out of 6 teams. Among the team’s top-performing returning swimmers is rising junior Camryn Lewis. She finished 4th in the 50 free (23.14)

Prior to coaching, Jordan swam competitively at Albion College, where he earned his bachelor’s in pre-law. He then furthered his education at the University of South Dakota receiving his master’s in health and physical education/fitness. While at South Dakota, Jordan initiated his coaching career by taking on a graduate assistant coaching position.

Upon completion of his studies, Jordan became the head coach at Iowa Lakes Community College, a Junior College that competes in the NJCAA. He also worked with the Oceania National Olympic Committees, which sent athletes to swim for him. Here, Jordan met his first elite swimmer from the Marshall Islands, which are located between Hawaii and the Philippines. Giordan Harris was the first athlete in the Marshall Islands to receive the Oceania Australia Foundation Scholarship – the Oceania National Olympic Committees’ program that provides athletes two years of academic sports scholarships to selected US junior colleges.

Harris competed at the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games and trained under Jordan from 2013 to 2015. During that time, Jordan traveled with Harris for the World Championships, Oceania Championships, and Pacific Games.

Jordan led the Iowa Lakes swim team for five years before switching over to Lincoln College.

Lincoln College hosted an exchange program catered toward Pacific Islanders that brought the swim team more talented individuals from the Marshall Islands. The two Marshallese athletes, Colleen Furgeson and Phillip Kinono, competed last summer at the Tokyo Olympic Games.

They asked Jordan to join them as the head coach of the Marshall Islands Olympic swim team. He accepted their invitation and “was able to tweak [his Olympic] dream and go as a coach.”