Jerod Simek – Director of Operations – Swimming & Diving Coaches

Simek enters his fourth yr because the director of swim and diver operations within the 2025-26 season.

Throughout his third season (2024-25) he helped Liv Dorshorst etch her title into the five hundred freestyle top-10 record as she personal’s this system’s third-quickest time (4:49.04). Adelaide Reaser closed out this season swimming this system’s Tenth-fastest 400 IM (4:20.38). He coached Kennedy Rainwater to the Tenth-fastest 1000 freestyle time of (10:08.64). Outside of the Illinois season, Rainwater received the ladies’s USA Aquathlon on a time of 38:41. She positioned ninth total out of almost 200 individuals. 

His sophomore marketing campaign (2023-24) he led Adelaide Reaser to a pair of top-10 program marks. She clocked this system’s third-fastest 1650 freestyle (16:43.10) and seventh-fastest 1000 freestyle (10:06.51). Additionally, Paloma Canos Cervera recorded the college’s fifth-fastest 1650 freestyle (16:46.22) beneath his steering. 

He joins the Illini after spending the final 5 seasons as the pinnacle coach of the lads’s/ladies’s swim and dive crew at his alma mater, Truman State University. Before turning into the pinnacle coach, he served the 2017-18 season because the interim coach. He was additionally a Health and Exercise Science Instructor from 2015-19. He taught undergraduates swimming strategies and the advantages of swimming.

As interim coach he helped the ladies’s crew end third and the lads’s crew end fifth within the Great Lakes Valley Conference (GLVC) Championship. Throughout the yr there have been loads of sturdy performances. He had a number of convention champions, a Freshman of the Year recipient and 12 faculty data damaged beneath his course. This crew had a 90% enchancment ratio within the publish season and three All-Americans had been named.

In his first season as assistant swimming coach, 2015-16, Simek helped the ladies’s crew to a GLVC title and a twelfth place end on the Division II NCAA Championships. The males’s crew completed fifth and twenty seventh respectively. In his second season he assisted the ladies’s crew to a second-place end and the lads to a fourth-place end within the GLVC Championships.

Simek was named head coach forward of the 2018-19 season. This season he led the ladies’s crew to a third-place end and the lads to a sixth-place end within the GLVC Championships. During the COVID-19 shortened season six of his swimmers named to All-American honors.

Prior to Truman State, Simek labored as a graduate assistant at Minnesota State University from 2013-15. During the summers of 2018-22 Simek coached at USAFA Swim Camp in Colorado Springs. He additionally coaches on the Rockwood Swim Club in the summertime months.

Simek earned his Master’s diploma in Sport and Exercise Psychology from Minnesota State. He earned his Bachelor’s diploma with a double main in Exercise Science and Psychology with a minor in Biology from Truman State.

Prior to his teaching days Simek competed as a student-athlete at Truman State. He was a nine-time honorable point out All-American and was a crew captain. He is the son of Jim and Ellen Simek and in addition has a twin brother, Andrew.