Courtesy: Pepperdine Athletics
MALIBU, California — Pepperdine swimming and diving head coach Ellie Monobe rounded out her coaching staff with the hire of diving coach Kaeden Cogbill.
“I am very excited to announce Kaeden as our latest addition to our staff,” Monobe said. “He will bring a wealth of experience to our program and has deep roots in diving in California. We are thrilled he will be a Wave and I look forward to working with him.”
Cogbill has nine years of coaching experience across the high school, club, junior college and collegiate ranks. His most recent stint was at Westcliff University — a NAIA school located in Irvine, Calif. — where he helped establish the swimming and diving program in March 2020.
“I am looking forward to coaching with Pepperdine because of its culture of athletic and academic excellence,” Cogbill said.
While coaching at Westcliff, Cogbill also was the head diving coach at Marina High School, located in Huntington Beach, Calif., from 2011-20. At Marina, Cogbill’s teams won seven Sunset League titles and went on to compete at the CIFSS finals in eight of his 10 years at the helm. Cogbill was named Marina High School’s Coach of the Year in 2015.
Prior to that, Cogbill took over as the diving coach for Orange Coast College, located in Costa Mesa California, in March 2018. During his first year, Cogbill led the Orange Coast College swim and dive team to a state championship. In his second year, Kaeden led one of the male divers to a sixth-place finish in the 1-meter dive at the state meet.
From 2016-19, Cogbill was the diving coach at Whittier College, a Division 3 school competing in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC). In his first year at the helm, Cogbill coached divers to the NCAA D3 regional and NCAA National meets — all while breaking the program’s 25-year-old 1 and 3-meter records along the way. He was named the South Coast Conference Diving Coach of the Year that season.
In the club ranks, Cogbill founded Coast Divers — formerly known as HB Divers — in 2014. As a club coach, Cogbill has coached divers to the 2018 and 2019 AAU national championships, plus the 2019 AAU Red-White-Blue Qualifiers.
Cogbill dove for Cypress College in 2012; prior to that, he dove for a local Southern California diving club. He earned his B.A. in psychology from Cal State Dominguez Hills in 2014, then earned a M.S. degree in psychology from Grand Canyon University. In addition, Cogbill also has a teaching credential in health science.
Monobe succeeded interim head coach Jana Vincent as the fourth full-time head coach in Pepperdine swim and dive history. Pepperdine will build upon a 2020 campaign that saw the Waves place second at the 2020 PCSC Championships, break seven school records and send seven swimmers to the CSCAA National Invitational Championships before the season was cut short due to COVID-19.