Jimi Kiner Reviews

I swam for the UT swim team throughout some of my college experience, and I have never been surrounded by such a toxic environment. First, I would like to start off by saying the coaching staff, but Jimi especially doesn't seem to care about you as a human being and your quality of life. You are more of a number and someone who can just score points and take them to NCAAs. The coaching style of this team is absolutely horrendous. With 11 workouts a week, not one of those is a guaranteed recovery workout, so you are constantly putting your body through ample amounts of intense exercise with a lack of rest and recovery time. My teammates and I would express time and time again about the importance of us having a recovery workout or just a lighter workout during the week to break up the intense workouts we were indulging in, but that wasn't a priority for them because they viewed it as recovery was one less step closer to a win in their eyes. Another HUGE problem I have with the coaching staff is they don't have disciplinary or leadership qualities. Jimi allows any type of behavior to be tolerated throughout the team and does not have what it takes to be a coach and hold people accountable for their actions. At the beginning of every season, he sits the team down and expresses that school comes first, then swimming, and then our social life, which is definitely not the case. Jimi does not care about how his swimmers are doing academically; as long as they show up to practice and swim fast, he's happy. He also does not hold his swimmers to the academic standards that they should be held to and does not provide any resources for those who are struggling. Another major problem I have with Jimi and his coaching staff is their lack of understanding and acknowledgment of the importance of mental health. Jimi never sat me down one on one and asked me how I was doing personally and mentally. A majority of the relationships he has with his swimmers are superficial and surface level, and he does not care to change that or get to know them on a deeper and more personable level which I feel is very important as a coach at the collegiate level because that is when we as humans change the most. I know a lot of other swimmers, and I have gone to him personally to open up to him about some of the mental struggles that we are going through, and he just brushed our feeling and emotions off and never comforted us and made us feel like we could go to him again if we were having these struggles. The team culture is honestly the only thing that got me through the years that I did spend swimming for this team. The team is very close; everyone looks after each other and checks up on one another. Overall, this team has gone downhill in the last couple of years and is just getting worse. The coaching staff and overall environment are very toxic and unsettling. There needs to be a major change in how this program is run and how the swimmers within this program are treated because, at a D2 level, there is no reason we should be treated with this much disrespect.