Augie Busch out as head coach of once-dominant Arizona Wildcats swim program

“Our swimming and diving program has a championship legacy, an outstanding home facility in the Hillenbrand Aquatic Center and incredible support, and we are confident that we will attract elite candidates,” UA athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois said in a news release distributed Friday evening. “We will work quickly to find a new head coach who is the best fit to continue building our championship culture.

“We thank Coach Busch for his service to Arizona and wish him well in the future,” Reed-Francois said.

It’s been 16 years since the Wildcats won side-by-side men’s and women’s NCAA championships under Busch’s father, longtime legendary UA coach Frank Busch; Augie Busch was a UA assistant at the time.

But now the program, which, per SwimSwam, saw its men’s team finish 12th, 17th, 32nd and 27th nationally over the past four NCAA championship meets, will start the new academic year with a different head coach for the fourth time in the last 11 seasons.

Arizona’s women’s program finished 25th, 19th and 18th nationally from 2021-23 but failed to place in 2024.

Arizona’s trail-off is magnified by the emergence of in-state rival ASU as a national power. The Sun Devils, men’s runners-up in 2023, won its first NCAA crown, bringing the 2024 men’s championship trophy back to Tempe this past March. When Bob Bowman left ASU the day after winning the championship to take over the swim programs at Texas, the Sun Devils installed Tucson native Herbie Behm, a Southern Arizona native who attended Catalina Foothills High School, to replace Bowman as head coach.

Busch served seven years at the helm (2017-24) of the UA program, taking over for Rick DeMont (2013-17), himself previously a longtime UA assistant under Frank Busch; DeMont was in the top role for four years, following roughly two years (2011-13) with Eric Hansen at the helm; Hansen was hired after Frank Busch retired following more than two decades leading the UA program.

Under Frank Busch, in addition to the matching team national championships in 2008, the Wildcats garnered 48 individual national championships and 31 relay championships, with the UA program having at least one swimmer win an individual national title over each of his last 20 seasons as coach.

But anything near that kind of success has been hard to come by for the Wildcats of late. Per the UA’s release, the Arizona men’s team’s chief successes in 2024 included a First Team All-American diver (Gage DuBois, also the Pac-12’s Freshman Diver of the Year) and a pair of second-team All-American relay units (400- and 200-meters). Arguably the top success for the UA women’s team in recent years has also been in diving, with Olympian Delaney Schnell capping off her stellar UA career last year with an NCAA individual championship in the platform dive in her last-ever college meet.

Augie Busch came to Tucson from Virginia, where he led the UVA women’s team to multiple ACC championships; under Todd DeSorbo, Busch’s replacement in Charlottsville, Virginia, the Cavaliers have upped the ante further by winning the last four women’s national championships.

Per the UA press release, Arizona will begin a national search for its next head coach immediately. Replacing Busch will lead to the first head coaching hire made by the UA under Reed-Francois’ watch. New UA football coach Brent Brennan was hired under previous athletic director Dave Heeke, just days before Heeke was fired from his post.