CEO & Head Coach John Bitter was recipient of the old "lead handshake" from Santa Clara Swim Club. "Financial irregularities" was given as the reason for his termination. Poor guy never had the chance to give the usual "more time with the family" reason.
Bitter's bio was scrubbed from the team's website, but is still available through Google's "cached" feature:
John Bitter
CEO/Head Coach
Over the course of his 24 years in the coaching profession, John Bitter has had the opportunity to train, develop, and establish swimmers and programs throughout the United States. John came to SCSC in September of 1995 as the Associate Head Coach, under the Dick Jochums. Working with Jochums, SCSC went on to win two National tiles for Men and one national title combined. Besides this, SCSC placed Tom Wilkens on the USA Olympic Team in 2000. Tom went on to win a bronze medal in the 200 IM.
Following the retirement of Jochums in December of 2006, John was elevated to the position of Head Coach of Santa Clara Swim Club. In this position, the club has seen tremendous growth in terms of both performance and number of swimmers and programs offered to the swimming community. In September of 2009, John was also given the title of CEO of the organization and today he heads a swim program that has diversified itself into Adult Fitness, Competitive, Developmental, and Learn-to-Swim programming.
As a coach, John accomplishments have been numerous. He has been a an Assistant Coach for the USA Swimming Junior Pan-Pac team in 2010, a two-time USA Swimming Select Camp coach, a USA Swimming Zone Development Camp Coach. John’s swimmers have produce multiple National, Junior, and Olympic qualifiers and he has had many of his former swimmers go on to compete in college at such schools as University of Georgia, University of Virginia, Rice University, Indiana University-Bloomington, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Davis, University of Arizona, University of Minnesota, University of Hawaii, just to name a few. The biggest joy John receives as a coach is when one of his swimmers is given the opportunity to continue his or her swimming at the college level, while also receiving their degree. Besides his work on the club level, John has also had success as a college coach, having worked with the 1989 NCAA Champion in the Men’s 1650 Free.
As a swimmer, John swam for Jim Tynan at Sugar Creek Swim Club in St. Louis, then for Martha Tillman at Washington University in St. Louis. Transferring after his sophomore year, John went on to swim for Dick Jochums at the University of Arizona. John was team captain his senior year. John received his B.A. in History from the University of Arizona and has done masters work in Sports Management at the University of San Francisco.
Former FCST head coach Allison Beebe is currently SCSC's Lead High Performance Coach and a possible replacement for Bitter.
2 comments:
Déja Vu Santa Clara Swim Club 2000.(Go read "Gold in the Water") These clubs, with parent run director boards, can be poorly run financially. I'm sceptical.
He bought a bar in Arizona with a million dollar loan he took out in the club's name. Also, as a swimmer who swam for his boss, Jochums; John was known to be very inappropriate around very young girls. When I first saw the headline of his arrest, my first reaction was honestly that his charges were some form of pedophilia. That is how creepy he was. Good riddance.
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